#eric foner

During my college and graduate student years, I was never once taught by a female or non-white historian—something all but impossible today. I look back with pride on the fact that the 75 or so historians whose dissertations I supervised during my own teaching career included numerous members of previously underrepresented groups, notably women and non-white men. Inevitably, changes in the historical profession have altered the ways we think about the American past.

We live at a moment in some ways not unlike the 1890s and early twentieth century, when state governments, with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, stripped black men of the right to vote and effectively nullified the constitutional promise of equality. “Principles which we all thought to have been firmly and permanently settled,” Frederick Douglass observed, were “boldly assaulted and overthrown.” As history shows, progress is not necessarily linear or permanent. But neither is retrogression.      By themselves, the constitutional amendments that emerged from the Civil War cannot address all the legacies of slavery. Sumner remarked of the Thirteenth Amendment that rewriting the Constitution was not an end in itself but “an incident in the larger struggle for freedom and equality.” But the Reconstruction amendments remain, in the words of one Republican newspaper, “a declaration of popular rights.”  They retain unused latent power that, in a different political environment, may yet be employed to implement in new ways the Reconstruction vision of equal citizenship for all.

Le bon historien n'est d'aucun temps ni d'aucun pays: quoiqu'il aime sa patrie, il ne la flatte jamais en rien.