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Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays
A treasury of current writings by one of the most acclaimed and influential historians of the United States.
Eric Foner has done more to shape the public and professional understanding of American history than any other scholar. The preeminent historian of the Civil War era, Foner’s keynote has been American freedom and its changing meanings and boundaries. We see in his award-winning works how freedom has been a birthright for some and a struggle for others, that rights gained can also be lost, that they must always be tended with knowledge and vigilance.
This volume collects fifty-eight of Foner’s more recent reviews and commentaries. Together they show the range of his interests and expertise, running from slavery and antislavery through the disunion and remaking of the United States in the nineteenth century, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and into our own political moment. Each piece shows a master at work, melding historical knowledge and balanced judgment with fine prose.
Eric Foner has done more to shape the public and professional understanding of American history than any other scholar. The preeminent historian of the Civil War era, Foner’s keynote has been American freedom and its changing meanings and boundaries. We see in his award-winning works how freedom has been a birthright for some and a struggle for others, that rights gained can also be lost, that they must always be tended with knowledge and vigilance.
This volume collects fifty-eight of Foner’s more recent reviews and commentaries. Together they show the range of his interests and expertise, running from slavery and antislavery through the disunion and remaking of the United States in the nineteenth century, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and into our own political moment. Each piece shows a master at work, melding historical knowledge and balanced judgment with fine prose.
496 pages, Hardcover
Published September 2, 2025
68 people are currently reading
1003 people want to read
About the author
Eric Foner
189 books674 followersEric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. and Ph.D. In his teaching and scholarship, Foner focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America. His Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, won the Bancroft, Parkman, and Los Angeles Times Book prizes and remains the standard history of the period. His latest book published in 2010 is The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.
In 2006 Foner received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians.
In 2006 Foner received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
December 10, 2025
I did not pay enough attention to the description of this book, especially this sentence : “This volume collects fifty-eight of Foner’s more recent reviews and commentaries.” Since the author has reviewed many works that deal with similar topics, his reviews of those works are sometimes repetitive when you read them one after the other. Perhaps it would be better not to read this book all at once, but to just dip into it, because this collection doesn’t build towards any conclusions. I have read and enjoyed other books by this author, but I wouldn’t start here. That being said, this book doesn’t build towards demonstrate the author’s depth of knowledge about the Civil War and Reconstruction. 3.5 stars
I received a free copy of this audiobook from the publisher.
I received a free copy of this audiobook from the publisher.
October 4, 2025
Excellent essays, as you might expect from the great historian Eric Foner (most famous for his works on the Reconstruction Era). Since it's mostly a collection of book reviews, and over 400 pages, I felt free to pick and choose the chapters I was interested in, rather than reading the whole book. He's a great writer and I'm sure I'd appreciate all the essays in the book, but I've got piles of books everywhere at home and still can't keep myself from getting new ones from the library, so I've decided I get to decide how much of a book I'll read. The worst problem with reading a bunch of book reviews is the temptation to read all the books being reviewed, but I'm hoping to resist that urge. (Smiley emoji goes here!)
The chapters I read:
The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
Israel Hill
Lincoln and Brown
The Emancipation of Abraham Lincoln
Whatever Happened to Integration
The Oldest Mass Party
American Anarchists (review of Lucy Parsons bio, which I'm pretty sure is on my to-read list)
Letter to Bernie
Du Bois
Rayford Logan
Vann Woodward
Hofstadter
American Myth
As with any good essayist/book reviewer, the chapters not only do justice to their topics, but give the reader much more to think about. And reading a bunch of them also gave me a lot to think about, so I'm glad I decided to check this out. And it's always at the library, in case I need to read more of it later.
The chapters I read:
The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
Israel Hill
Lincoln and Brown
The Emancipation of Abraham Lincoln
Whatever Happened to Integration
The Oldest Mass Party
American Anarchists (review of Lucy Parsons bio, which I'm pretty sure is on my to-read list)
Letter to Bernie
Du Bois
Rayford Logan
Vann Woodward
Hofstadter
American Myth
As with any good essayist/book reviewer, the chapters not only do justice to their topics, but give the reader much more to think about. And reading a bunch of them also gave me a lot to think about, so I'm glad I decided to check this out. And it's always at the library, in case I need to read more of it later.
September 21, 2025
A Curated Essay Collection from An Honored Historian
Eric Foner is a top-tier historian and remarkable writer, and in his latest book, we're treated with a compilation of nearly 60 of his book reviews and essays. Though I wish there were more of the latter than the former, Foner provides enough context and insights of his own so a reader unfamiliar with the discussed books can still enjoy the reviews.
Particularly crucial are the pieces that speak to our current political climate, such as analyses of the 14th Amendment (birthright citizenship), the electoral college, political parties, teaching history in schools, and freedom of speech and the press, as well as how these concepts have changed throughout our history. Turns out, the January 6, 2021 insurrection was not as unprecedented as I thought (and leave it to a historian to prove it)! Personally, I especially appreciated the autobiographical glimpses scattered here and there, such as lessons learned from his parents and uncle, or the time he met W.E.B. Du Bois.
Eric Foner is a top-tier historian and remarkable writer, and in his latest book, we're treated with a compilation of nearly 60 of his book reviews and essays. Though I wish there were more of the latter than the former, Foner provides enough context and insights of his own so a reader unfamiliar with the discussed books can still enjoy the reviews.
Particularly crucial are the pieces that speak to our current political climate, such as analyses of the 14th Amendment (birthright citizenship), the electoral college, political parties, teaching history in schools, and freedom of speech and the press, as well as how these concepts have changed throughout our history. Turns out, the January 6, 2021 insurrection was not as unprecedented as I thought (and leave it to a historian to prove it)! Personally, I especially appreciated the autobiographical glimpses scattered here and there, such as lessons learned from his parents and uncle, or the time he met W.E.B. Du Bois.
November 23, 2025
Foner, McCullough, Cox Richardson, Hochschild, and Larson are all basically deities at this point. Radden Keefe is on his way too.
January 23, 2026
Flat 4.0 stars I decided, of this book of essays, the majority of which are book reviews, and some of which are newspaper and magazine columns. (I was originally going to call it 4.25 or even a bit more, rounded down, but finally decided I couldn't.)
I’ve read about half of the books he reviewed, and agreed with the great majority of his takes, but Foner is quite wrong in a a coupleof cases.
It's solid overall, and it is Eric Foner, the dean of historians about US post-Civil War Reconstruction. But one big issue, directly vis-a-vis the Civil War and possible alternative history for Reconstruction, and a set of issues with another author he fluffs too much, get him dinged.
The former?
In the section of this book about the Civil War, he seems to agree with James Oakes and David Reynolds that Lincoln stopped pushing colonization for Black Americans after releasing the Emancipation Proclamation. I definitely disagree with both, on very good evidentiary grounds and have argued with Oakes on this. See here. He doesn’t expressly state that, but it seems that’s his take. And it’s simply wrong. Lincoln continued to push Cow Island throughout 1863, then switched and started talking to the British about British Honduras, talk that went into 1864 and did not officially end, though it was on hold, at the time of his assassination. Days AFTER the 1864 general election, he asked outgoing AG Edward Bates if the Congressional remit for colonization commissioner James Mitchell was still valid, and Bates — painfully and slowly, from the accounts I’ve read — gave him the legally correct answer. And, it’s been established that Lincoln met Spoons Butler at the White House just days before his assassination, and a strong case made that, even deducting for Butler’s inflations of what was discussed, that colonization was indeed on the table. Foner knows all of this, and that everything up to Butler, at least, is indisputable. Why, then, after saluting how Civil War historians crawled out from under the Dunning School 60-plus years ago, does he still have attachment to St. Abraham of Lincoln on this? Beyond that, in parallel with the Dunning School, why doesn't he call out the great many US Civil War historians for being too attached to this legend?
The second is the essay talking about Michael Kazin’s history of the Democratic Party. It first goes wrong by puffing his bio of William Jennings Bryan, who was and is NOT all that, as I describe in detail, and ignoring that Kazin is using Bryan to puff St. Bernard of Sanders. Then, on Kazin’s main book Foner repeats Kazin errors. Reality is that Democrats did NOT invent the progressive income tax. St. Abraham of Lincoln did. The income tax of the Civil War was actually unconstitutional, assessed on individual Americans without respect to population by state, but it was progressive, as the first version had a “standard deduction” and the second had two tax brackets. Forward to modern times and it was Republican president Taft who got the 16th Amendment voted out of Congress and sent to state legislatures, not a Democrat. Kazin should know this and is being mendacious. Foner should know this and thus is giving cover for mendaciousness.
There are many things that do keep it at four stars, though. Among them are encomia essays for C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, the third- and second-last in the book. That said, thinking in terms of book editing, I think it would have been even better for them to have been the last two. On Woodward, I had no idea he had drifted that far rightward, within academic American history, in the last decade before his death.
I’ve read about half of the books he reviewed, and agreed with the great majority of his takes, but Foner is quite wrong in a a coupleof cases.
It's solid overall, and it is Eric Foner, the dean of historians about US post-Civil War Reconstruction. But one big issue, directly vis-a-vis the Civil War and possible alternative history for Reconstruction, and a set of issues with another author he fluffs too much, get him dinged.
The former?
In the section of this book about the Civil War, he seems to agree with James Oakes and David Reynolds that Lincoln stopped pushing colonization for Black Americans after releasing the Emancipation Proclamation. I definitely disagree with both, on very good evidentiary grounds and have argued with Oakes on this. See here. He doesn’t expressly state that, but it seems that’s his take. And it’s simply wrong. Lincoln continued to push Cow Island throughout 1863, then switched and started talking to the British about British Honduras, talk that went into 1864 and did not officially end, though it was on hold, at the time of his assassination. Days AFTER the 1864 general election, he asked outgoing AG Edward Bates if the Congressional remit for colonization commissioner James Mitchell was still valid, and Bates — painfully and slowly, from the accounts I’ve read — gave him the legally correct answer. And, it’s been established that Lincoln met Spoons Butler at the White House just days before his assassination, and a strong case made that, even deducting for Butler’s inflations of what was discussed, that colonization was indeed on the table. Foner knows all of this, and that everything up to Butler, at least, is indisputable. Why, then, after saluting how Civil War historians crawled out from under the Dunning School 60-plus years ago, does he still have attachment to St. Abraham of Lincoln on this? Beyond that, in parallel with the Dunning School, why doesn't he call out the great many US Civil War historians for being too attached to this legend?
The second is the essay talking about Michael Kazin’s history of the Democratic Party. It first goes wrong by puffing his bio of William Jennings Bryan, who was and is NOT all that, as I describe in detail, and ignoring that Kazin is using Bryan to puff St. Bernard of Sanders. Then, on Kazin’s main book Foner repeats Kazin errors. Reality is that Democrats did NOT invent the progressive income tax. St. Abraham of Lincoln did. The income tax of the Civil War was actually unconstitutional, assessed on individual Americans without respect to population by state, but it was progressive, as the first version had a “standard deduction” and the second had two tax brackets. Forward to modern times and it was Republican president Taft who got the 16th Amendment voted out of Congress and sent to state legislatures, not a Democrat. Kazin should know this and is being mendacious. Foner should know this and thus is giving cover for mendaciousness.
There are many things that do keep it at four stars, though. Among them are encomia essays for C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, the third- and second-last in the book. That said, thinking in terms of book editing, I think it would have been even better for them to have been the last two. On Woodward, I had no idea he had drifted that far rightward, within academic American history, in the last decade before his death.
October 9, 2025
Eric Foner’s Our Fragile Freedoms (Norton) is a selection of essays he’s written since about 1999. He was unknown to me until I heard him being interviewed on Maine Public Radio. If for no other reason, Our Fragile Freedoms is a must read for anyone who wants to make sense of our country’s current condition but who isn’t steeped in the history of white supremacy in America. This is the history that the far right would prefer to keep expunge from every school and college curriculum, lest our current condition becomes too well understood. It isn’t necessary to read all fifty seven essays to learn important truths about that history, from the years immediately preceding the Civil War to the Trump presidency, though it is rewarding. For me, someone unversed in the scholarly literature of this subject, Foner provided an introduction to a library of significant and interesting research by other historians, past and present, not only through reviews of new books but within analytic essays that report on the thinking in bygone eras. Inevitably, there is some repetition in this anthology, such as the fact that some 200,000 Black men served in the Union army and navy during the Civil War, as each essay originally had to stand on it’s own, without the ability to depend on its first readers knowing everything we learn in this volume. These repetitions are easy to slide over. Oddly, Foner’s review of the depths to which many of our political leaders and judges have sunk over many past eras, while showing how fragile our freedoms are, offers some basis to hope that we may resurrect and retain our freedoms in the future.
October 23, 2025
This is a wonderful collection of book reviews, book forwards and essays by one of the nation's foremost historians, Eric Foner. Although the entries take readers from the colonial period through the near-present, each one can stand alone allowing readers the pick and choose subjects that most interest them.
Foner specializes in the Civil War, Reconstruction and civil rights, other subjects are presented with the same clarity and depth as he uses on subjects of his specialties. As a bonus, this book -- one of dozens the Columbia professor has written -- can be used as a wonderful guide to books on important subjects and people in the nation's history. This is the kind of book that can remain on your bookshelf and serve as a go-to source not only to review Foner's thought but also direct readers to others have Foner believes have something to say about various people and events. Although almost 450 pages, Fragile Freedoms moves on at a good clip in that most entries are less than 10 pages.
Foner specializes in the Civil War, Reconstruction and civil rights, other subjects are presented with the same clarity and depth as he uses on subjects of his specialties. As a bonus, this book -- one of dozens the Columbia professor has written -- can be used as a wonderful guide to books on important subjects and people in the nation's history. This is the kind of book that can remain on your bookshelf and serve as a go-to source not only to review Foner's thought but also direct readers to others have Foner believes have something to say about various people and events. Although almost 450 pages, Fragile Freedoms moves on at a good clip in that most entries are less than 10 pages.
January 7, 2026
Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays by Eric Foner is a terrific collection, full of deep and thoughtful insights drawn from fifty eight books the author engaged with across his career. The scope alone is impressive, and the essays reflect Foner’s long standing commitment to understanding freedom, citizenship, and democracy in the United States.
If the book has a weakness, it is simply the pace. With so many essays included, some of them pass quickly, leaving the reader wanting more time with certain arguments or themes. That said, this is also part of the book’s strength. There is an extraordinary amount of insight packed into a relatively compact volume, and I found it consistently engaging because of that density.
This is a highly recommended read for anyone interested in Reconstruction, Black history in the United States, or the evolving meaning of freedom in American life. It rewards careful reading and offers a valuable window into both the books discussed and Foner’s own intellectual journey.
If the book has a weakness, it is simply the pace. With so many essays included, some of them pass quickly, leaving the reader wanting more time with certain arguments or themes. That said, this is also part of the book’s strength. There is an extraordinary amount of insight packed into a relatively compact volume, and I found it consistently engaging because of that density.
This is a highly recommended read for anyone interested in Reconstruction, Black history in the United States, or the evolving meaning of freedom in American life. It rewards careful reading and offers a valuable window into both the books discussed and Foner’s own intellectual journey.
November 17, 2025
Eric Foner is one of the most revered scholars of 19th-century America, having written the definitive history of Reconstruction. This collection of essays and book reviews written from approximately the late 1990s to the present, presents the reader (or listener, in this case, since I listened to the audio version) with a strong introduction to Foner's work and his viewpoint. As someone interested in the study of the study of history, my attention naturally turned to Foner's review of a book about C. Vann Woodward and the introduction he wrote for a book on Richard Hofstadter. Presenting Foner's works in digestible, bite-sized chunks is a good way for the casual reader to go further into Foner's deeper work, especially on Reconstruction.
October 20, 2025
This was a little dry but overall I enjoyed this essay collection. Some of these are particularly poignant considering the current political situation in America. I liked how even the essays that were reviews explained things. My only issue was these did get a little repetitive because information was repeated over and over again simply due to the essays being on similar topics and written at different times. For example, the stuff on Lincoln and Reconstruction was repeated over and over again.
October 4, 2025
A fascinating exploration of history mostly through reviews of historical writings. I endorse the holistic understanding of history presented in these essays. In fact, I’ve compiled a list of books from these reviews to add to my reading list. The final essay’s thesis is particularly poignant, without a universal understanding of our shared history the nation has become more divided.
December 29, 2025
What a fascinating structure for a book. I have read Foner's previous works and wasn't sure what to expect; this was a great way to get a short overview of a subject while simultaneously learning new works to dive into.
January 20, 2026
A clear-eyed reminder that American freedoms were never guaranteed and are never finished. Foner is measured rather than alarmist, but the cumulative effect is quietly unsettling. A book that deepens the present by refusing to simplify the past.
October 4, 2025
Reviews of recent books in American history
October 13, 2025
Want a list of history/sociology books to read, but lack the time to read them all? Foner's read them, and offers his reviews - along with other essays on the American experiment.
November 6, 2025
Highly engaging collection of essays from one of our most important historians. Insightful, measured and thoughtful. As usual.
December 17, 2025
Its thorough it’s confusing. It made me feel smart and dumb at the same time. It gives you a reading list for 2026.
December 29, 2025
This is a fantastic book and will introduce you to many other excellent American history books. Recommended very highly!
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews