Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays

Pulitzer-winning historian Foner (The Second Founding) collects previously published book reviews and opinion pieces in this probing and incisive volume. The essays span the past 25 years, “a period of remarkable creativity among American historians” as the discipline reckoned with its shortcomings and began telling the stories of “groups whose historical experience” had “been ignored.” At the same time, Foner writes, “the pieces reproduced here also remind us of the current crisis of American democracy.” For example, he points to the “violent uprisings” in the Reconstruction-era South as a precursor to the January 6 insurrection, and to his own father’s 1960s sacking from his position at CUNY over his pro-civil-rights sympathies as parallel to present-day attempts to muzzle academics. Throughout, Foner offers correctives to received historical wisdom; for instance, in a piece on conservative opposition to big government, he notes that it was conservatives who created the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the “most robust” ever “expansion[s] of federal authority... over individual Americans.” In another chilling parallel with the present, Foner describes how that measure “created a new category of federal officeholder, U.S. commissioners,” who could “issue certificates of removal, documents that could not be challenged in any court.” Then as now, Foner astutely observes, “the danger to American democracy ultimately lies within.” Written with clarity and purpose, these meditations on life and history galvanize. (Sept.)