Eric Foner

The Reconstructions Failures The reconstruction was a failure. Rather than bringing the different races, North, and South together, the government made it look as though the union was going to change and it brought violence. The government brought new rules such as the black codes and sharecropping to unite the black and white. Violence comes in through the Ku Klux Klan or KKK and legacy of southern bitterness. To begin, the southern states created the black codes which were a set of rules…

Since early history, slavery has existed. We start to begin to see slavery-like actions when Columbus founded the new world. He thought that the natives would be easy to take over due to their lack of religion. But the Columbian exchange was the event that introduced African American slavery when African slave owners would trade slaves for other goods. Those slaves were brought into the new world or what is today, America. Years after the thirteen colonies gained their independence from the…

In the Preface of the textbook, Give Me Liberty!, the author Eric Foner draws attention to three key points about the concept of freedom and its importance in American history. The three points are “the meanings of freedom, the social conditions that make freedom possible, and the boundaries of freedom that determine who is entitled to enjoy freedom and who is not”. Foner’s concept of freedom address that freedom is more than one variable. Over the years as America grew and change to be what it…

The Gulf of Tonkin incident happened on August 2, 1964, when according to Eric Foner of Give Me Liberty, “North Vietnamese vessels encountered an American ship on a spy mission off its coast… North Vietnamese patrol boats fired on the American vessel” (p.996). After the incident occurred Johnson went on TV and said, “Hostile actions…

The biggest myth about Abraham Lincoln is the perception of his views on slavery and the idea that he was the “Great Emancipator” (Zilversmit). Lincoln is often put on a pedestal when it comes to the topic of slavery. Countless Children’s books and grade school level textbooks have credited him for ending slavery. Even some authors of Abraham Lincoln biographies have written him down as the freer of slaves, such as the author of The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Josiah Gilbert Holland, who wrote: “he…

So, according to the colony leaders if you follow the moral liberties you are accepted by God (Foner, Give me liberty!). Most Puritans followed the moral liberties, but a few followed Hutchinson and were banished along with her. They defined natural liberty as the ability to do good or evil. Moral liberty, dictated by those in power, would replace…

Politically, the red scare has swept across america, as conservatism becomes very popular to combat “the others”, of radical communism playing off the recent WW1. However within america, the opposite of roaring promise was the case for many americans. Foner reports the reality of the average population, “At the beginning of 1929, the share of national income of the wealthiest 5 percent of American families exceeded that of the bottom 60 percent. A majority of families had no savings, and an…

Humans are often discriminated based on race, religion, and ethnicity. African-Americans have been oppressed with racial discrimination among other things their right to vote was denied to them by the white settlers. Their whole life they were being treated unequally, they were discriminated and ambushed daily. Holiday performed “Strange Fruit,” she was jeopardizing herself in terms of releasing the song out in 1939, this song made Americans look bad because they were harmful to the Africans.…

disadvantage of an inferior army in terms of size (Zinn, 118). To continue, the greatest advantages of the Union were its superior resources and larger sized army. According to Give Me Liberty by Eric Foner, “by 1865, more than 2 million men had served in the Union army and 900,000 in the Confederate army” (Foner, 540). This demonstrates an obvious upper hand, as an increase in people signifies an increase of power and capability. Moreover, the North had superior resources by outstripping…

For African Americans in the South, life after slavery was a world transformed. After the civil war, and the achievement of their new-found freedom, African Americans, struggled to gain the same or near the same rights that the white people had. Along with the fact that most had to restart their lives from the beginning. But little by little African Americans slowly gained their rights and equality. The republicans or (Radical Republicans) where the reason 13th amendment was put as a law…