![]() ![]() It was widely shared in the famous movie ‘Birth of a Nation,’ a little bit of it in ‘Gone With the Wind’ and bestsellers, etcetera,” Foner said. ![]() It was created by Southern historians or Northerners who adopted that view. “That view was really part of the ideology or the legitimation of the Jim Crow South. That's what we might call ‘fake history’ today,” he said. “This idea of Reconstruction as really the lowest point in the history of American democracy, because African-Americans were suddenly given civil and political rights, that is a total myth. This Cleveland-based literary prize is awarded to authors who address racism and diversity through their work. A professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, Foner is this year’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Lifetime Achievement winner. These two groups manipulated recently freed Black slaves leading to an era rife with corruption and incompetency.įoner has dedicated much his career to correcting this mistaken notion Reconstruction was a failure through his work as an academic as well as by authoring numerous books. “Carpetbaggers” from the North aided by opportunistic Southern “scalawags” came to take advantage of the recently defeated South. Growing up in New York City in the 1950s, Eric Foner said he was taught that the Reconstruction era, which followed the U.S. ![]()
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