Historian Eric Foner on the Elections, Reconstruction, and Racism Today
Channel: Laura Flanders & Friends
Date: 2016-04-19

This Week: Making sense of the election season with a historian. From Confederate monuments and the Black Lives Matter movement to election politics and utopian communities, Foner discusses today’s politics through the legacy of the past, and Laura takes a new look at a hundred-year-old proclamation. Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is one of this country's most prominent historians, and the foremost expert on the civil war and reconstruction.  He is the author of more than 20 books, including many classics, such as Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War; Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy; and Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. His most recent book is Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.