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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2014
What follows is a written reproduction of a forum held at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in San Francisco in April 2013. The forum commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Kate Masur (Northwestern University) organized and introduced the discussion, and the commentators in order of speaking were the following:
• Heather Andrea Williams, The University of Pennsylvania
• Gregory P. Downs, City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
• Thavolia Glymph, Duke University
• Steven Hahn, The University of Pennsylvania
• Eric Foner, Columbia University
1 Foner, Eric, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy (Baton Rouge, 1983)Google Scholar; Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Foner and Mahoney, Olivia, America's Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York, 2005).Google Scholar
2 Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970).Google Scholar
3 Perman, Michael, “Eric Foner's Reconstruction: A Finished Revolution,” Reviews in American History 17 (March 1989): 74, 78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Litwack, Leon, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Berlin, Ira, Fields, Barbara J., Glymph, Thavolia, Reidy, Joseph P., and Rowland, Leslie S., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867: Volume 1: The Destruction of Slavery (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Berlin, Ira and Rowland, Leslie S., eds., Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Bois, W.E.B. Du, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (Philadelphia, 1935).Google Scholar
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7 Eagleton, Terry, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven, 2011)Google Scholar, 181.
8 Major-General Geo. B. McClellan to Virginians, Cincinnati, May 26, 1862, Department of the Ohio, OR, II: 1, p. 753.
9 Stampp, Kenneth M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956), vii–viii.Google Scholar
10 Foner, Reconstruction, xxv.
11 Saville, Julie, Review of Foner's Reconstruction in International Labor and Working-Class History 36 (Fall 1989): 97.Google Scholar
12 Foner, Reconstruction, 3.
13 Jung, Moon-Ho, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, 2006)Google Scholar, 33.
14 See, for example, McKiernan-González, John, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 (Durham, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Stacey L., Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 2013).Google Scholar
15 As quoted in Stampp, 426.
16 Foner, Eric, “The Continuing Evolution of Reconstruction History,” OAH Magazine of History 4:1 (1989): 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 Dubois, W.E.B., Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935)Google Scholar, 16.
18 Foner, Nothing But Freedom, 72.
19 See Hahn, Steven's recently published “Slave Emancipation, Indian Peoples, and the Projects of a New American Nation-State,” The Journal of the Civil War Era, 3, no. 3 (September 2013): 307–330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Ibid., 72.
21 Foner, Reconstruction, xxvi–xxvii.
22 Foner, Eric, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy.
23 DuBois, Black Reconstruction; Montgomery, David, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York, 1981).Google Scholar
24 Kantrowitz, Stephen, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York, 2012).Google Scholar
