Episode Summary
Historian and optimist Eric Foner grew up through McCarthyism and the Civil Rights Movement and learned that one of the best ways to interpret history is that no matter how things are there is an opportunity to make them better. Syd and Eric talk about how the issues of the past are the issues of today, the dangers of romanticizing our history, and how some things never change. Professor Foner gives an unvarnished primer in American History and you might be surprised at how current it sounds, in this episode of The Sydcast.
Syd Finkelstein
Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.
Eric Foner
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, is one of this country's most prominent historians. He received his doctoral degree at Columbia under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter. He is one of only two persons to serve as president of the three major professional organizations: the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians, and one of a handful to have won the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes in the same year.
Professor Foner's publications have concentrated on the intersections of intellectual, political, and social history and the history of American race relations. His books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Eric Foner is a winner of the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates (1991), and the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching from Columbia University (2006). He was named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities in 1995. In 2006, he received the Kidger Award for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship from the New England History Teachers Association. In 2014 he was awarded the Gold Medal by the National Institute of Social Sciences. In 2020 he received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement (the award honors literature that confronts racism and explores diversity), and the Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award from the Organization of American Historians. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He has been awarded honorary degrees by Iona College, Queen Mary University of London, the State University of New York, Dartmouth College, Lehigh University, and Princeton University. He serves on the editorial boards of Past and Present and The Nation, and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, London Review of Books, and many other publications, and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows, including Charlie Rose, Book Notes, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Bill Moyers Journal, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered, and in historical documentaries on PBS and the History Channel. He was the on-camera historian for "Freedom: A History of Us," on PBS in 2003 and the chief historical advisor for the award-winning PBS documentary series on Reconstruction and its aftermath broadcast in 2019. He has lectured extensively to both academic and non-academic audiences. Professor Foner retired from teaching in 2018.
Insights from this episode:
- Details on Reconstruction in America, what it was, what went wrong, and how it changed the world.
- Strategies for staying objective and finding truth when everyone seems to be living in different realities at the same time in history.
- How to be hopeful about when current events make the future seem bleak.
- Benefits of learning history, how it shapes our ideals today, and what our present can teach us about our future.
- Details about Abraham Lincoln and what his principles and methods can teach us today about developing our own standards.
- Reasons why books written about history are subjective and need to be more objective.
Quotes from the show:
- “Things are always inevitable after they’ve happened.” – Eric Foner
- “I grew up understanding how fragile liberty is in our country, or in any other country.” – Eric Foner
- “It’s not just a historical debate. The issues of Reconstruction are the issues of today.” – Eric Foner
- On Reconstruction: “The tragedy was not that it was attempted, but that it failed and that left, for a century almost, this question of racial justice in the United States.” – Eric Foner
- “History is in the eye of the beholder.” – Syd Finkelstein
- “Being objective does not mean you have an empty mind … it means you have an open mind. You have to be willing to change your mind.” – Eric Foner
- “History is an ongoing process of reevaluation reinterpretation. There is never just the end of the story.” – Eric Foner
- On Professor Foner’s lecture on Reconstruction: “It’s a statement about what kind of country should America be.” – Syd Finkelstein
- On what a professor does: “The creation and dissemination of knowledge.” – Syd Finkelstein
- On Abraham Lincoln: “We’ve had many presidents, including the current one, who can not stand criticism, Lincoln welcomed it. He thought he could learn. He thought his entire life he could learn new things.” – Eric Foner
- “That’s what makes you a historian. You have to be able to weigh evidence, judge evidence, balance things out.” – Eric Foner
- “The historical narrative is an act of the imagination by the historian … what you leave out is as important as what you put in.” – Eric Foner
- On the primary system of voting: “It enables the motivated electorate, which is a small percentage, to have an unbelievable influence.” – Syd Finkelstein
Books by Eric Foner
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970; reissued with new preface 1995)
Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976)
Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983)
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988) (winner, among other awards, of the Bancroft Prize, Parkman Prize, and Los Angeles Times Book Award)
The Reader's Companion to American History (with John A. Garraty, 1991)
The Story of American Freedom (1998)
Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (2002)
Give Me Liberty! An American History (2004)
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) (winner, among other awards, of the Bancroft Prize, Pulitzer Prize for History, and The Lincoln Prize)
Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2015) (winner of the American History Book Prize by the New-York Historical Society)
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (2019)
Lectures by Eric Foner
During the 2014-15 academic year, his Columbia University course on The Civil War and Reconstruction was made available online, free of charge, via ColumbiaX and EdX. They can also be found on YouTube.
PART 1: THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR
PART 2: THE CIVIL WAR
PART 3: RECONSTRUCTION
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Eric Foner
Website: www.ericfoner.com
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