A May Day protest against the committee’s witch hunt at City College.(Courtesy of the New York State Archives)
My education as a historian began at home. My father, Jack D. Foner, was a historian, as was his twin brother, my uncle Philip. W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson were family acquaintances, and history was a frequent point of discussion around our dinner table in the suburbs of New York City.
But the history that my brother Tom and I absorbed was quite different from what we were taught at school. There, slavery and modern-day racism were rarely, if ever, mentioned. My parents, however, instilled in us the conviction that the Jim Crow system was a scandalous injustice and that radical dissenters such as Frederick Douglass—whose powerful speeches and writings my uncle collected and published in five influential volumes—were among the most heroic Americans. The only time I recall hearing my father use a common four-letter epithet was in 1955, when a radio news broadcast announced that an all-white Mississippi jury had acquitted the killers of the Black teenager Emmett Till.
Long before the depredations of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Rapp-Coudert Committee of the New York State Legislature in Albany launched an effort to purge the City University of New York of “subversive” elements. My father and uncle Philip lost their teaching jobs. Later, my mother, Liza, was dismissed from her job as a high school art teacher.
My uncles Henry and Moe, who were also blacklisted, went on to become key leaders of New York City’s labor movement. Their experience taught me another important historical lesson: the fragility of civil liberties. Freedom of speech and the right to dissent were not ingrained in the American system from the outset. They grew in importance over time thanks in considerable measure to the actions of those outside the political mainstream—among them antislavery speakers who confronted proslavery mobs, members of the Industrial Workers of the World who demanded the right to deliver public speeches without prior approval from local authorities, and women’s rights advocates who violated the law by disseminating information about birth control. It was through efforts like these that the words of the Bill of Rights were transformed from what James Madison called ineffective “parchment barriers” to become living principles in a reinvigorated American democracy.
I also learned—in part from my father, who established one of the first African American studies programs—that Black history is American history. This insight, a central theme of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, does not mean that other histories are of no importance, but rather that the Black experience has been central to the historic evolution of our politics and society and to our evolving understanding of freedom for all Americans. By inspiring other social movements that transformed our ideas about the meaning of freedom, African American struggles for justice played a major role in the emergence of the modern idea of universal human rights.
The work of all historians is shaped by the social, intellectual, and political environment in which they live. We see how the reputations of historical figures change over time as new standards of judgment emerge. Woodrow Wilson, for example, was once lionized for attempting to lay the foundation for a post–World War I international order based on the self-determination of peoples. But in retrospect, he has become the target of harsh criticism for presiding over the wartime suppression of civil liberties (one of the low points in the history of freedom in the United States) as well as his unwillingness to include African Americans and the colonial subjects of European empires in his pledge to make the world “safe for democracy.” Our current political alignments have directed new attention to the once obscure George Wallace—the father, so to speak, of Nixon’s Southern strategy and the racial politics of the modern Republican Party.
Although historians are often warned to avoid presentism—that is, reading present-day values and concerns back into the past—many of us draw on a knowledge of history to illuminate our own times. My own work emphasizes the continuing relevance of the Reconstruction period to the world in which we live. In the past two generations, no era of American history has undergone a more complete revision of historical interpretation. I contributed to this transformation through my books, as well as by lecturing on Reconstruction to numerous nonacademic audiences, cocurating a major museum exhibition on the subject, serving as an adviser to a prizewinning public television documentary series, and initiating the process that led to the establishment of a national historical park in Beaufort, South Carolina, devoted to Reconstruction.
The study of Reconstruction has left a deep imprint on my scholarship more generally. Research on those years led me to appreciate that freedom has never been a single, fixed idea. As my work on Reconstruction made clear, in the aftermath of the Civil War, former slave owners, formerly enslaved African Americans, and millions of Northerners held radically different ideas about what freedom meant and how it might be achieved. The titles of many of my books include the words freedom, free, and liberty.
Of course, freedom has been an American preoccupation ever since the Revolution gave birth to a nation that identified itself as a unique embodiment of freedom in a world overrun by oppression. The Declaration of Independence includes liberty among mankind’s unalienable rights; the Constitution announces at the outset the aim of securing the “blessings of liberty.” As the educator and statesman Ralph Bunche wrote in 1940, “every man in the street, white, red, black, or yellow, knows that this is ‘The land of the free…[and] the cradle of liberty.’”
Yet freedom is neither a fixed idea nor a story of progress toward a predetermined goal. The history of American freedom is a tale of debates and struggles. Often, battles for control of the idea illustrate the contrast between the “negative” and “positive” meanings of freedom, a dichotomy elaborated by Isaiah Berlin in an influential essay in 1958. Negative liberty defines freedom as the absence of outside restraints on individual action. Positive liberty is a form of empowerment—the ability to establish and achieve one’s goals. While the first sees government as a threat to individual freedom, the second often requires governmental action to remove barriers to its enjoyment.
Freedom played an unexpectedly large role in the 2024 presidential election. The Democratic National Convention opened with a Kamala Harris campaign ad backed by Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” Nearly a century earlier, in the wake of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt had linked freedom to economic security for ordinary Americans. This definition of freedom, a product of the New Deal, assumed an active role for the federal government. But since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan effectively redefined freedom as limited government, low taxes, and unregulated economic enterprise, Democrats had largely ceded the word to their opponents. Now they wanted it back. Harris crisscrossed the country talking about freedom. The most frequently articulated demand of Democrats, a response to the Supreme Court decision of 2022 overturning the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, was for “reproductive freedom”—the ability to make intimate decisions free of government interference.
In this moment of crisis, we need a unified, progressive opposition to Donald Trump.
We’re starting to see one take shape in the streets and at ballot boxes across the country: from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign focused on affordability, to communities protecting their neighbors from ICE, to the senators opposing arms shipments to Israel.
The Democratic Party has an urgent choice to make: Will it embrace a politics that is principled and popular, or will it continue to insist on losing elections with the out-of-touch elites and consultants that got us here?
At The Nation, we know which side we’re on. Every day, we make the case for a more democratic and equal world by championing progressive leaders, lifting up movements fighting for justice, and exposing the oligarchs and corporations profiting at the expense of us all. Our independent journalism informs and empowers progressives across the country and helps bring this politics to new readers ready to join the fight.
We need your help to continue this work. Will you donate to support The Nation’s independent journalism? Every contribution goes to our award-winning reporting, analysis, and commentary.
Thank you for helping us take on Trump and build the just society we know is possible.
Sincerely,
Bhaskar Sunkara
President, The Nation
Yet the 2024 campaign was not the first time a presidential election became, in part, a contest to define the meaning of freedom. In 1964, the journalist Theodore White observed that freedom was the “dominant word” of both civil rights activists and supporters of the conservative Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, although they meant entirely different things by it. The United States, White concluded, sorely needed “a commonly agreed-on concept of freedom.”
No recent president employed the word more often—and more egregiously—than George W. Bush, who made it an all-purpose justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the conflict that followed, dubbed by the president “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” In his first inaugural address, Bush used the words freedom, free, or liberty seven times. In his second inaugural, a 22-minute speech delivered after the US invasion, those words appeared no fewer than 49 times. Bush’s invocation of the ideal of freedom to justify an unprovoked war seemed to make his immediate successors wary of using the word at all. Barack Obama did not speak as much about freedom as he did about community, equality, and personal responsibility. Nor has freedom been a major theme of Donald Trump, who prefers to speak of raw military and economic power (although on the Internet you can buy T-shirts displaying the slogan “Trump Fighting for Freedom”).
The only duty we owe to history, Oscar Wilde once remarked, is to rewrite it. New questions, new information, and the changing status of various groups of Americans will inevitably produce new historical insights. So will the changing composition of the historical profession. During my college and graduate student years, I was never once taught by a female or non-white historian—something all but impossible today. I look back with pride on the fact that the 75 or so historians whose dissertations I supervised during my own teaching career included numerous members of previously underrepresented groups, notably women and non-white men. Inevitably, changes in the historical profession have altered the ways we think about the American past.
Historical interpretation both reflects and helps to shape the politics of the moment in which the historian is writing. For decades, the Dunning School, named for Columbia University professor William A. Dunning and his students, dominated historical writing on Reconstruction. In their account, the post–Civil War era was a time of misgovernment caused by the supposedly misguided decision to grant political rights to Black men. The incapacity of Black people was a foundational assumption of historical scholarship at a time when the study of the past was becoming professionalized. The South’s Jim Crow order required a historical foundation to support its claim to legitimacy—and for much of the 20th century, historians played a major role in providing it.
Today, the writing and teaching of history has been drawn into the vortex of the culture wars. Why is history so controversial? The French historian Ernest Renan had an answer. Historical analysis, he famously wrote in the late 19th century, has always been linked to broader ideas about the nation-state. National consciousness, or at least the sense of unity and patriotic pride that accompanies nation-building, he argued, rests in part on historical mythology. Indeed, Renan wrote, because “historical error” plays a significant role in the creation of a national consciousness, advances in the field of history—including the replacement of myth by accurate accounts of the past—are often seen as “a threat to the nation.”
Over a century ago, the historian Carl Becker wrote that history is what the present chooses to remember about the past. We see this in recently enacted state laws barring the teaching of controversial or disturbing ideas and mandating a celebration of American history that gives short shrift to the less-than-praiseworthy realities of our past. These laws reflect our current cultural and political polarization, with each side embracing its own concept of what the United States has been, is, and should be.
The 250th anniversary of American independence is fast approaching. But rather than playing a unifying role, the study of history reinforces our society’s divisions. So does the clash between two definitions of freedom—one exclusionary and linked to ethno-cultural identity, the other inclusive and egalitarian—both rooted in the American experience.
Heated controversy over what history books students and interested adults should encounter has a long history. In 1923, the historian James Truslow Adams warned that the “forces of reaction and obscurantism” were on the march, seeking to determine how history was taught. At around the same time, the United Daughters of the Confederacy were successfully demanding the removal of history textbooks from Southern classrooms if they failed to present slavery as a benign institution and the war for Southern independence as a gallant struggle for liberty. A different memory survived in Black communities, a remembrance of the 200,000 Black men who served in the Union army and navy during the Civil War and of the tragedy of enslaved children separated from their families. Remembering history at a time when others distort or seek to forget it can itself be a form of resistance.
During the McCarthy era, works by supposedly disloyal historians—including a seemingly uncontroversial history of Jews in the United States by my uncle Philip—were removed from the State Department’s overseas libraries. In the 1990s, national history standards designed by a partnership of both educators and historians at the behest of the National Endowment for the Humanities became the subject of controversy for, in the eyes of detractors, devoting excessive attention to the roles of women, African Americans, and other groups whose experiences had previously been slighted by historians. Too much Harriet Tubman, critics complained, not enough George Washington.
Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.
Whatever the outcome of current controversies, the teaching and public presentation of history have changed considerably since I became a historian. Textbooks now offer a far more nuanced and bittersweet portrait of the American past than when I was in school. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has attracted millions of visitors—a powerful rebuke to the belief that the historical narratives students and the general public encounter should reinforce traditional lessons, assumptions, and prejudices rather than challenging them. Today, one can also visit the International African American Museum in Charleston, located on the site where many thousands of Africans disembarked from ships carrying them into American bondage. Another fairly recent historical venue is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which opened in 2018 and whose unsparing exhibits commemorate the more than 4,000 victims of lynching during the Jim Crow era. In Jackson, the exhibits at the Museum of Mississippi History and the adjacent Mississippi Civil Rights Museum offer a surprisingly candid account of that state’s unsettling history. But the very dissemination of new historical perspectives has produced a countervailing reaction: laws that seek to limit what students are allowed to read and learn.
“The past is the key of the present and the mirror of the future.” Robert G. Fitzgerald, an African American who fought in both the Union army and navy during the Civil War, wrote these words in his diary in the early days of Reconstruction. As our country confronts a troubled present, perhaps a candid account of our history, the mirror of a future we cannot yet know, will help lay the foundation for a more equal, more just nation and a reinvigorated American democracy.
Eric FonerEric Foner, a member of The Nation’s editorial board and the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.