Eric Foner is an American historian. He has been a faculty member in the department of history at Columbia University since 1982 and writes extensively on political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, Reconstruction, and historiography. Foner is the leading contemporary historian of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. In 2000, he was elected president of the American Historical Association, the highest honor accorded an American historian.