Freedom and American Identity March 27, 2007

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=812

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, discusses the importance of "freedom" to American self-identity, and examines its historical status as an evolving and contested idea.

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Eric Foner speaks on the history of freedom under the U.S. Constitution. This is the second lecture of a four-part series.

This four-part lecture series curated by Sam Haselby, Visiting Professor, and co-sponsored by the Leonard and Louise Riggio Writing and Democracy Program, the New School Writing Program, and Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts aims to deepen public understanding and raise critical awareness of this charter document of the United States by bringing three of the country's leading scholars of law, history, and literature and one of America's outstanding human rights activists to address the topic of the Constitution in Crisis.

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century America. He received his B.A. from Columbia in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1969.

His publications include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970), Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976), Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (1980), Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983), Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 18631877 (1988), Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (1993), and The Story of American Freedom (1998).

In 2000, he served as President of the American Historical Association.