""History," wrote James Baldwin, "does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do."" "Rarely has Baldwin's insight been more forcefully confirmed than in our current conflict-ridden times. History itself has become a matter of public controversy as Americans clash over the way it is represented in museums, in the flying of the Confederate flag, or in the proposals for paying reparations for slavery. So whose history is being written? Who owns it?".

"In Who Owns History? Eric Foner proposes his answers to these and other questions about the historian's relationship to the world of the past and the future. He reconsiders his own earlier ideas and those of the pathbreaking historian Richard Hofstadter. He also examines international changes during the past two decades - globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa - and their effects on historical consciousness. He concludes with new considerations of the enduring but often misunderstood legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction."--BOOK JACKET.