[1] According to historian Timothy Snyder, Foner is the first to associate the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with section three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Eric Foner describes his father as his "first great teacher", and recalls how, deprived of his livelihood while I was growing up, he supported our family as a freelance lecturer.

Listening to his lectures, I came to appreciate how present concerns can be illuminated by the study of the past—how the repression of the McCarthy era recalled the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the civil rights movement needed to be viewed in light of the great struggles of black and white abolitionists, and in the brutal suppression of the Philippine insurrection at the turn of the century could be found the antecedents of American intervention in Vietnam.

Du Bois—were as central to the historical drama as presidents and captains of industry, and how a commitment to social justice could infuse one's attitudes towards the past.

[10]After graduating from Long Beach High School in 1959, Foner enrolled at Columbia University, where he was originally a physics major, before switching to history after taking a year-long seminar with James P. Shenton on the Civil War and Reconstruction during his junior year.

If historians have not yet forged a fully satisfying portrait of Reconstruction as a whole, the traditional interpretation that dominated historical writing for much of this century has irrevocably been laid to rest.

"This book is not simply a distillation of the secondary literature; it is a masterly account – broad in scope as well as rich in detail and insight.

C. Vann Woodward, in The New York Review of Books, wrote, "Eric Foner has put together this terrible story with greater cogency and power, I believe, than has been brought to the subject heretofore.

Foner identified a threat to existing minority groups within the Baltic states, who were in turn threatened by the new nationalist movements.

[19][20][21] Journalist Nat Hentoff described Foner's The Story of American Freedom as "an indispensable book that should be read in every school in the land.

"[24] John Patrick Diggins of the City University of New York wrote that Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, was a "magisterial" and "moving" narrative, but compared Foner's "unforgiving" view of America for its racist past to his notably different views on the fall of communism and Soviet history.

[25] Foner's book Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2015) was judged "Intellectually probing and emotionally resonant" by the Los Angeles Times.