Eric Foner Thinks Anew About Lincoln and Slavery

As one of the nation's most prominent historians, Eric Foner has fulfilled a Columbia tradition of making history relevant to our own time, especially for audiences beyond the academy. While Foner retains a scholarly skepticism of facile comparisons between past and current events, he has consistently worked to make history part of our contemporary culture. Now he is about to publish his 22nd book, this one on a topic about which some might have thought there was little left to say: Abraham Lincoln and slavery. But it turns out that, despite Foner's own extensive scholarship on the 16th president's tumultuous epoch, the specific focus of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (W.W. Norton) remained fresh for him. "I have touched on Lincoln in a number of my books on the pre-Civil War period, the Reconstruction era after the war," he explains.