Foner, Eric

Foner, Eric (1943–  ) historian; born in New York City. Educated at Oxford, England (B.A. 1965) and Columbia University (Ph.D., 1969), he taught at Columbia (1969–73; 1982) and the City College of New York (1973–82). He soon gained prominence as a proponent of the new sociological approach to history, which he applied in such works as Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (1980), where he looked beneath the traditional explanations to posit control of African-American labor as the basic issue of Reconstruction.