OUR FRAGILE FREEDOMS

Peering into the past for a “mirror of the future.”

Foner, a distinguished historian, offers trenchant reflections on slavery and its legacy—and how they bear on the current crisis of American democracy. In this collection of almost 60 book reviews and opinion pieces, he examines the work of his colleagues and reflects on what he calls his major preoccupations: slavery and antislavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. The book devotes a section to each concern, then adds one more on general topics in American history and another on notable historians and the role of history in public life. Intended for general audiences, these clear, polished, and discerning essays originally appeared in major newspapers and journals of opinion, mostly on the left, beginning in the early 1990s. Taken as a whole, they support Foner’s claim that American civil liberties, whose breach affected his family during his youth, are more fragile than most of us imagine. Slavery was the ultimate violation of that ideal, and Foner notes that no part of U.S. history has been studied more intensively or outstandingly during his lifetime. Yet he maintains that his profession’s preoccupation with slavery stands in stark contrast to the national desire to forget it. He also connects his most persistent concerns with “the current crisis of American democracy, reflected in intense political polarization, the weaponization of base prejudice, and refusal to accept the outcomes of elections. This situation is not unprecedented. American democracy has always been a terrain of conflict.” Foner’s body of work reminds us that freedom, that elusive ideal, has long been contested: sometimes bitterly, sometimes brutally, but never decisively.

Lively and judicious critiques of American historians and their work.