Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“The past is the key to the present and the mirror of the future.”

— Robert G. Fitzgerald (1840-1919), free African American and a founder of the Freedom Bureau’s schools in North Carolina quoted in Foner’s Our Fragile Freedoms.

“We’re all fighting over what it means to be an American right now,” Oscar-winning actress and Hollywood producer Jennifer Lawrence, the star of The Hunger Games and Winter’s Bone, recently observed. If Lawrence sees it, who doesn’t? It’s everywhere. The fight she has in mind—call it a chapter in the ongoing culture wars — has been waged in the streets of LA and Chicago, in courtrooms, classrooms, the workplace, homes and in the pages of newspapers and magazines.

How will it end? That’s not clear. It might end with more democratic socialists elected to public office, or it might end with a conflagration engineered by Trump & Co. We the people will have a say in how it plays out.

Not many American historians have joined the fray with more gusto and integrity than Eric Foner, a professor emeritus at Columbia University—which recently knuckled under to Trump and mangled the cause and the practice of academic freedom.

Foner is the author of more than two-dozen books, including biographies of Tom Paine, Nat Turner and Abraham Lincoln, as well as comprehensive studies of Reconstruction, the Civil War, the underground railroad and two aptly titled volumes, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World and Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History. A student of historiography and the study of history, as well as history itself, Foner would like yet another American Revolution, one which would fulfill the promise of Reconstruction when Blacks held public office and the nation made strides toward equality until a counterrevolution came along and installed Jim Crow.

Our Fragile Freedoms, Foner’s latest book, brings together topical and timely essays reprinted from The Nation, The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. They originally appeared in print from 1992 to 2024, many of them from the second decade of the twenty-first century. They are still fresh.

Insights and electrifying observations abound. In the introduction, Foner echoes and endorses a quotation from Thomas Wentworth Higgginson—the commander of a unit of African American soldiers in the Civil War. “Revolutions may go backward,”........

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