Dunning School facts for kids
The Dunning School is a historiographical school of thought regarding the Reconstruction period of American history (1865–1877), supporting conservative elements against the Radical Republicans who introduced civil rights in the South. It is named for Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning, who taught many of its followers.
The Dunning School viewpoint favored conservative elements in the South (the Redeemers, plantation owners and former Confederates) and disparaged Radical Republicans who favored civil rights for former slaves.
History
The school was named after Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning (1857–1922), whose writings and those of his PhD students comprised the main elements of the school. He supported the idea that the South had been hurt by Reconstruction and that American values had been trampled by the use of the U.S. Army to control state politics. He contended that freedmen had proved incapable of self-government and thus had made segregation necessary. Dunning believed that allowing blacks to vote and hold office had been "a serious error". As a professor, he taught generations of scholars, many of whom expanded his views of the evils of Reconstruction. The Dunning School and similar historians dominated the version of Reconstruction-era history in textbooks into the 1960s. Their generalized adoption of deprecatory terms such as scalawags for southern white Republicans and carpetbaggers for northerners who worked and settled in the South, have persisted in historical works.
Criticism of the Dunning School
In 1935, W. E. B. DuBois attacked the premises of the Dunning School in Black Reconstruction, setting forth ideas such as the active agency of blacks in the era, that the struggle over control of black labor was central to the politics of the era, and that Reconstruction was a time of great promise and many accomplishments, the overthrow of which was a tragic defeat for democracy. While the work was largely ignored by historians at the time, later revisionist scholars lauded DuBois's analysis.
Historian Kenneth M. Stampp was one of the leaders of the revisionist movement regarding reconstruction, which mounted a successful attack on Dunning's racially biased narrative. Historian Jean Edward Smith wrote that the Dunning School "despite every intention to be fair" wrote from a white supremacist perspective.
Some historians have suggested that historians sympathetic to the Neo-Confederate movement are influenced by the Dunning School's interpretation of history.
Representative Dunning School scholars
- Claude Bowers, The Tragic Era (1929), best-selling popular history by an Indiana writer
- William Watson Davis, The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida (1913).
- J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina (1914).
- Walter Lynwood Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (1905).
- James Wilford Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi (1901).
- Charles W. Ramsdell, Reconstruction in Texas (1910).
- John Schreiner Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865–1877 (1905).
- Thomas Staples, Reconstruction in Arkansas, 1862–1874 (1923).
- C. Mildred Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia (1915).
- E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction (1947).
- Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (1901).
