ABSTRACT
In Reconstruction, Eric Foner’s aim is to better understand what shaped abolition and the successes and failures of the period following the American Civil War. Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 addresses several important questions regarding the Civil War and Reconstruction. Research on Reconstruction began with the work of William A. Dunning and the political scientist John Burgess, and continued with the students they taught at Columbia University. The idea that African Americans were biologically inferior to whites was widely accepted until the second half of the twentieth century. This view became dominant because social scientists such as Herbert Spencer adapted nineteenth-century naturalist Charles Darwin’s research on evolutionary biology and applied it—unscientifically—to racial difference. The Enlightenment provided the intellectual context for ideas like this to emerge, and also to be challenged.
