Eric Foner Quotes

#1. A man working for wages his whole life is not really free. That is why Jefferson said, you have to own land. Southerners said, - and they weren't being hypocritical - they said slavery is the foundation of freedom because if you own slaves, you are freer yourself.

Eric Foner

#2. People instinctively turn to the past to understand the present. But the questions the historian asks are given to him or her by the world they live in.

Eric Foner

#3. Who owns history? Everyone and no one
which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.

Eric Foner

#4. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.

Eric Foner

#5. Freedom has been privatized - it is how you dress, what your sexual orientation is, choosing your own life. That's fine. But that is not what Thomas Jefferson was talking about.

Eric Foner

#6. I think here is the irony of American history. We don't have an established church. When you have an established church nobody takes religion as seriously as we do here. We have a free market in religion. The religious groups are competing with each other.

Eric Foner

#7. Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state.

Eric Foner

#8. Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of
themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember

Eric Foner

#9. By the war's end, some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army - over one fifth of the nation's adult male black population under age forty-five.

Eric Foner

#10. We shall lie down," Lincoln warned, "pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State." Lincoln

Eric Foner

#11. The problem is that we tend too often to read Lincoln's growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars to ignore or downplay aspects of Lincoln's beliefs with which they are uncomfortable.

Eric Foner

#12. Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. "They are just what we would be in their situation,

Eric Foner

#13. For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

Eric Foner

#14. Successful teaching rests both on a genuine and selfless concern for students and on the ability to convey to them a love of history.

Eric Foner