Expert Report of Eric Foner

Race has been a crucial line of division in American society since the settlement of the American colonies in the beginning of the 17th century. It remains so today. While the American understanding of the concept of race has changed over time, the history of African-Americans provides a useful template for understanding the history of race relations. The black experience has affected how other racial minorities have been treated in our history, and illuminates the ways in which America\u27s white majority has viewed racial difference

Race, democracy, and citizenship in nineteenth-century America

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 1994

Columbia and Slavery: A Preliminary Report

Drawing on papers written by students in a seminar Professor Eric Foner directed in the spring of 2015 and another directed by Thai Jo­­­nes in the spring of 2016, all of which will soon be posted on this website, as well as Professor Foner's research and relevant secondary sources, this report summarizes Columbia’s connections with slavery and with antislavery movements from the founding of King’s College to the end of the Civil War. Significant gaps remain in our knowledge, and investigations into the subject, as well as into the racial history of the university after 1865, will continue

Cwbr Author Interview: The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln And American Slavery

Interview with Dr. Eric Foner, Dewitt Clinton Processor of History at Columbia University Interviewed by Nathan Buman Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Today, I\u27m joined by Eric Foner who is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University to discuss his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. Professor Foner, congratulations on your award and thank you for joining me. Eric Foner (EF): Thank you very much; I\u27m happy to talk to yo

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

In April 1876, Frederick Douglass delivered a celebrated oration at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, D.C., a statue that depicted Abraham Lincoln conferring freedom on a kneeling slave. “No man,” the great black abolitionist remarked, “can say anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln. This has not in the ensuing 130 years deterred innumerable historians, biographers, journalists, lawyers, literary critics and psychologists from trying to say something new about Lincoln. Lincoln has always provided a lens through which Americans examine themselves

Mixed unions reveal progress in integration but also enduring societal social cleavages, which revolve around race in the US and religion in Europe

Recent months have seen debates over immigration and the integration of immigrants into North American and Western European societies come to the fore in public discourse. In new research, Richard Alba and Nancy Foner assess the state of immigrant integration by analysing unions between those with non-Western immigrant origins and those from native majorities in North America and Western Europe. They find that, while the frequency of mixed unions varies among countries, the greater variation occurs among groups, reflecting pronounced social cleavages in different countries: racial divisions, especially between blacks and whites, in the United States and the separation between Muslims and long-established secular/Christian natives in Western Europe. Other factors, including the settler society experience in North America and cultural traditions among Muslim groups, also play a role

Dynamical magneto-electric coupling in helical magnets

Collective mode dynamics of the helical magnets coupled to electric polarization via spin-orbit interaction is studied theoretically. The soft modes associated with the ferroelectricity are not the transverse optical phonons, as expected from the Lyddane-Sachs-Teller relation, but are the spin waves hybridized with the electric polarization. This leads to the Drude-like dielectric function $\epsilon(\omega)$ in the limit of zero magnetic anisotropy. There are two more low-lying modes; phason of the spiral and rotation of helical plane along the polarization axis. The roles of these soft modes in the neutron scattering and antiferromagnetic resonance are revealed, and a novel experiment to detect the dynamical magneto-electric coupling is proposed.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Electronic Structure of Nearly Ferromagnetic compound HfZn2_{2}

The electronic structure of HfZn$_{2}$ has been studied based on the density functional theory within the local-density approximation. The calculation indicates that HfZn$_{2}$ shows ferromagnetic instability. Large enhancement of the static susceptibility over its non-interacting value is found due to a peak in the density of states at the Fermi level