ABSTRACT
Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 is widely considered to be the most thorough and coherent account of the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Besides his scholarly writing, Foner is a prolific public intellectual and civil rights activist. Foner's work is still of particular relevance because, while freedom and equality are the founding values of the United States, in practice, African Americans continue to face discrimination and inequalities in areas such as education, employment, and criminal justice. Foner's work is perhaps best understood in the context of historiography-the evolution of a historical debate and the various approaches to a particular topic or historical period. In the case of Reconstruction, a half century of revisionist historians have shown the previously dominant interpretation of Reconstruction, offered by the Dunning School, to be invalid and have advanced our understanding of the great complexities of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
