Early Life
Foner was born in New York City, the son of Liza (née Kraitz), a high school art teacher, and historian Jack D. Foner, who actively supported the Spanish Republic against fascism during the Spanish Civil War, the trade union movement, and the campaign for civil rights for African Americans. In 1981, Jack Foner received an apology from the New York City Board of Higher Education for an "egregious violation of academic freedom" in 1941 that had resulted in his blacklisting for thirty years. Jon Wiener, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, wrote that Eric Foner describes his father as his "first great teacher," and recalls how, "deprived of his livelihood while I was growing up, he supported our family as a freelance lecturer... . Listening to his lectures, I came to appreciate how present concerns can be illuminated by the study of the past—how the repression of the McCarthy era recalled the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the civil rights movement needed to be viewed in light of the great struggles of Black and White abolitionists, and in the brutal suppression of the Philippine insurrection at the turn of the century could be found the antecedents of American intervention in Vietnam. I also imbibed a way of thinking about the past in which visionaries and underdogs—Tom Paine, Wendell Phillips, Eugene V. Debs, and W. E. B. Du Bois—were as central to the historical drama as presidents and captains of industry, and how a commitment to social justice could infuse one's attitudes towards the past."
Foner earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Columbia University in 1963; a second B.A. from Oriel College, Oxford, as a Kellett Fellow in 1965; and a Ph.D. in 1969, under the tutelage of Richard Hofstadter at Columbia University.
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