Eric Foner

Citas

• “Alone among the societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century, the United States, for a moment, offered the freedmen a measure of political control over their own destinies.”

• “The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became.”

• “Slavery, Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens proudly affirmed, was the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Accordingly, slavery's disintegration compelled the Confederate government to take steps to save the institution, and these policies, in turn, sundered white society.”

• “History, however, is not a linear narrative of progress. Rights may be won and taken away; gains are never complete or uncontested, and popular movements generate their own countervailing pressures.”

• “America at the turn of this century is a far freer, more egalitarian society than in 1900.”