Eric Foner Professor of History, Columbia University.

Foner specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century America. His books, which have received the Bancroft and Parkman prizes, include: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970), Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976), Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (1980), Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983), Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988),Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (1993), and The Story of American Freedom, (1998). In 2000, he served as President of the American Historical Association. His latest book, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World, was published in 2002 by Hill and Wang. He received his B.A. from Columbia in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1969.