
Philip Sheldon Foner was an American labor historian and teacher. Foner was a prolific author and editor of more than 100 books. He is considered a pioneer in his extensive works on the role of radicals, Black Americans, and women in American labor and political history, which were generally neglected in mainstream academia at the time. A Marxist thinker, he influenced more than a generation of scholars, inspiring some of the work published by younger academics from the 1970s on.