ABSTRACT
Prior to publishing Reconstruction in 1988, Foner had published journal and press articles on Reconstruction and two books related to the subject:Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men and Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. In it, he explains that the Republican Party believed that its ideology of free labor (popular in the North) was superior to slave labor. He goes on to argue that while promoting the idea of free labor in the South was easy, implementing it was not. Since publishing Reconstruction in 1988, Foner has written or edited 15 books, and has published numerous journal and press articles on different aspects of the Civil War, slavery, abolition, and Reconstruction. Through both his scholarly contributions and his role as a public intellectual and activist, Foner has made a significant impact on the popular understanding of American history from 1863 to 1877, and its relationship to contemporary race relations.
