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About
From the late nineteenth century until World War I, a group of Columbia University students gathered under the mentorship of the renowned historian William Archibald Dunning (1857-1922). Known as the Dunning School, these students wrote the first generation of state studies on the Reconstruction - volumes that generally sympathized with white southerners, interpreted radical Reconstruction as a mean-spirited usurpation of federal power, and cast the Republican Party as a coalition of carpetbaggers, freedmen, scalawags, and former Unionists.
Edited by the award-winning historian John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, The Dunning School focuses on this controversial group of historians and its scholarly output. Despite their methodological limitations and racial bias, the Dunning historians' writings prefigured the sources and questions that later historians of the Reconstruction would utilize and address. Many of their pioneering dissertations remain important to ongoing debates on the broad meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the evolution of American historical scholarship.
This groundbreaking collection of original essays offers a fair and critical assessment of the Dunning School that focuses on the group's purpose, the strengths and weaknesses of its constituents, and its legacy. Squaring the past with the present, this important book also explores the evolution of historical interpretations over time and illuminates the ways in which contemporary political, racial, and social questions shape historical analyses.
Edited by the award-winning historian John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, The Dunning School focuses on this controversial group of historians and its scholarly output. Despite their methodological limitations and racial bias, the Dunning historians' writings prefigured the sources and questions that later historians of the Reconstruction would utilize and address. Many of their pioneering dissertations remain important to ongoing debates on the broad meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the evolution of American historical scholarship.
This groundbreaking collection of original essays offers a fair and critical assessment of the Dunning School that focuses on the group's purpose, the strengths and weaknesses of its constituents, and its legacy. Squaring the past with the present, this important book also explores the evolution of historical interpretations over time and illuminates the ways in which contemporary political, racial, and social questions shape historical analyses.
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Reviews
"William Dunning and the historians he trained or was associated with early in the twentieth century both affected and reflected how Americans viewed Reconstruction and the history of race relations. This study is the first attempt to explain and analyze the lives and work of these historians as a unit. A superb contribution to the history and historiography of the era of the Civil War and Reconst
Michael Green, author of Lincoln and the Election of 1860
"Students of Reconstruction will be fascinated by this superb, bracing, and insightful collection of beautifully crafted essays. For expertly editing and gathering these essays, we are indebted to John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, not least because they help us understand with unusual and sobering precision that what we write today is heavily influenced by past historiographies. The Dunning
Mark Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History, University of South Carolina
"No other existing book examines the whole corpus of "Dunning" scholarship; the individual essays are solidly grounded in primary sources; the evaluation of the books of the various authors is clear, judicious, and timely; and the subject matter will be of great interest to most historians of the South"
John B. Boles, author of The South Through Time: A History of an American Region