Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought.

A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine determine the nation's destiny.

In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks.

Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare....

This "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) made history when it was originally published in 1988. It redefined how Reconstruction was viewed by historians and people everywhere in its chronicling of how Americans -- black and white -- responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) has since gone on to become the classic work on the wrenching post-Civil War period -- an era whose legacy reverberates still today in the United States.

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Adopted at over 600 universities, colleges, and schools across the country, Eric Foner's Give Me Liberty! is making a difference in the American history survey course. Featuring a single author and a single, comprehensive theme, Give Me Liberty! presents American history with unparalleled clarity and coherence. The study tools in the book and the companion print and electronic package ensure student success in the course.

The Second Edition builds on the success of the first, retaining the unifying theme of freedom while becoming more comprehensive, and adding stronger coverage of Native American and immigration history. In addition, the pedagogy has been strengthened with new Voices of Freedom paired primary sources in each chapter, chapter-opening chronologies, key terms, and more. Overall the presentation remains concise and crisp, free of the encyclopedic detail that clogs so many other survey textbooks.

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From the Revolution to our own time, freedom has been America's strongest cultural bond and its most perilous fault line, a birthright for some Americans and a cruel mockery for others. Eric Foner takes freedom not as a timeless truth but as a value whose meaning and scope have been contested throughout American history. His sweeping narrative shows freedom to have been shaped not only in congressional debates and political treatises but also on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and bedrooms. His characters include the well-known--Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan--and the anonymous--former slaves, union organizers, freedom riders, and women's rights advocates. In the end he gives us a stirring history of America itself focused on its animating impulse: freedom....

An abridged version of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, the definitive study of the aftermath of the Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize, Avery O. Craven Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Award, Francis Parkman Prize, and Lionel Trilling Prize.

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Adopted at over 600 universities, colleges, and schools across the country, Eric Foner's Give Me Liberty! is making a difference in the American history survey course. Featuring a single author and a single, comprehensive theme, Give Me Liberty! presents American history with unparalleled clarity and coherence. The study tools in the book and the companion print and electronic package ensure student success in the course.

The Second Edition builds on the success of the first, retaining the unifying theme of freedom while becoming more comprehensive, and adding stronger coverage of Native American and immigration history. In addition, the pedagogy has been strengthened with new Voices of Freedom paired primary sources in each chapter, chapter-opening chronologies, key terms, and more. Overall the presentation remains concise and crisp, free of the encyclopedic detail that clogs so many other survey textbooks.

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This analysis of the American Civil War pieces together a complex sequence of events, at the centre of which was slavery and the issue of its expansion into America's western territories. The author examines the political controversy that severed the bonds of union, and depicts the leading political and military figures of the era, including William Lloyd Garrison, Nat Turner, Dred Scott, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. The text also describes the innovations of 19th century warfare and the superior resources that enabled the North to emerge victorious. The book is illustrated throughout with rare photographs from the collection of the Chicago Historical Society....

Concise, clear, compact, Eric Foner’s brilliant synthesis of American history is the perfect teaching tool for the U.S. survey course. Unlike so many textbooks that overwhelm beginning students with encyclopedic detail, Give Me Liberty! presents the events of American history in a nimble chronological narrative that equips students to understand their significance. It is a textbook that works

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An illustrated companion volume to the first major museum exhibit on the era of Reconstruction, written by the author of Reconstruction, the award-winning definitive book on the period. The book reproduces many of the exhibit's photos, lithographs, political cartoons, flags, quilts, and other artifacts of the era. 100 black-and-white photos; 8 pages of color photos....