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The Story of American Freedom: 1776-2005

Eric Foner: April 5, 2005; Running Time: 1:25:25

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Although the idea of freedom is nearly ubiquitous in American public discourse -- and perhaps no more so than today – it has been subject to a remarkable degree of flux over the course of the nation’s history. Eric Foner describes it as “a subject of persistent conflict and debate,” from the earliest times. “This country founded with the rhetoric of freedom was also a slave society,” says Foner. “Slave owners insisted that slavery was the real foundation of freedom, because a free individual was a person who was autonomous, not reliant on others for their economic livelihood. Owning a slave enhanced one’s freedom.” Foner believes that battles “at the boundaries of freedom,” by African Americans and other racial minorities, women and workers, “have deepened and extended the meaning of freedom into more areas of life.” After the nation accepted the 14th amendment -- “a nonracial idea of freedom”-- the next battle coalesced around economic freedom. Should an individual be allowed to pursue economic self-interest without outside restraint, or should economic freedom come to mean economic security—a living wage, a safety net? World War II, and the encounter with fascism, helped “reshape the internal boundaries of freedom,” says Foner, and served as the origins of the civil rights struggle in the U.S. The Cold War refocused the nation on free enterprise, central to our global battle against tyranny. And now globalization and terrorism challenge our notions of freedom. Foner deplores the current administration’s belief in a single sustainable model of freedom – our own. This chauvinism, he believes, violates the very notion of an open society, and paves the way for restricting freedoms at home.

Lecture Details

Location: 6-120

“This forever unfinished story of American freedom needs to become a dialogue with the rest of the world, not just a complacent monologue with ourselves. If the tragedy of 9/11 helps us to think historically and make interconnections with the rest of world, then maybe some good will have come out of that tragic event.”

Eric Foner

About the Speaker

Eric Foner

DeWitt Clinton 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.