Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World

＂Who Owns History? testifies to Eric Foner’s lifelong personal commitment to writing histories that advance the struggle for racial equality and economic justice.＂ --David Glassberg, The Sunday Star-Ledger

History has become a matter of public controversy, as Americans clash over such things as museum presentations, the flying of the Confederate flag, and reparations for slavery. So whose history is being written? Who owns it?

Eric Foner answers these and other questions about the historian’s relationship to the world of the past and future in this provocative, even controversial, study of the reasons we care about history--or should.

Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of many highly acclaimed works in American history, notably The Story of American Freedom and Reconstruction. In 2011, he won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize for The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. He lives in New York City.