21 Quotes by Eric Foner

It is a well known fact that Abraham Lincoln spent much of his spare time visiting wounded soldiers in Union Army hospitals. I've spent thirty years teaching history at Columbia and I don't think I've spent more than fifteen minutes in the freshman dorm. Are we the ones keeping Lincoln's memory alive? Or are we burying it?

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

By this time, everyone understood that [President] Hayes would adopt a new Southern policy. "As matters look to me now," wrote the chariman of Kansas' Republican state committee on February 22 [1877], "I think the policy of the new administration will be to conciliate the white men of the South. Carpetbaggers to the rear, and niggers take care of yourselves." (p.581)

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.

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

A new future requires a new past.

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.

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.

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.