William Archibald Dunning

William Archibald Dunning (1857–1922) was an American historian who taught many PhD students and founded the Dunning School of Reconstruction historiography at Columbia University. Between 1886 and 1903 he taught history at Columbia, and was named a full professor in 1904.

Career

Born in Plainfield, N. J., Dunning was among the founders of the American Historical Association and AHA president in 1913.

Dunning School

Many Southerners (and some Northerners) took PhDs in History under Dunning and returned to the South, where they dominated the major history departments. They comprised the informal "Dunning School." The interpretation of post-Civil War Reconstruction that the Dunning School propounded was the dominant theory taught in American universities until in the first half of the 20th century. Bradley says, "The Dunning school condemned Reconstruction as a conspiracy by vindictive radical Republicans to subjugate southern whites at bayonet point, using federal troops to prop up corrupt state regimes led by an unholy trinity of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen." Bradley notes that the Dunning interpretation was "received compelling treatment in such popular works as Claude Bowers’s The Tragic Era and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind—both the best-selling novel and the blockbuster film."

Reconstruction's players include the "carpetbaggers", Yankee new arrivals whom the Dunning School portrayed as greedy interlopers exploiting the South and dominating the Republican Party; the "scalawags", who were native southern whites collaborating with the Republicans; and the freedmen, whom the Dunning School portrayed as tools of the Carpetbaggers with little independent voice.

McRary says Dunning and his followers portrayed former plantation owners as honorable people with the South's best interests in mind.

Dunning was a Democrat who like most historians denounced the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Dunning wrote from the point of view of the northern Democrats and painted the Radical Republicans as men who violated American traditions and were motivated by vengeance. Dunning School influence is evident in John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage, which admired Edmund G. Ross, the Kansas Republican senator who cast the vote that acquitted Johnson.[Joshua Zeitz The New Republic, 18 January 1999, pp. 13-15]

Criticism

The Dunning School has been attacked by neoabolitionist historians who seek to place African Americans at the center of Reconstruction. The revisionist view was expanded and revised by Eric Foner and others.

Dunning's views were disputed by black historians W. E. B. Du Bois beginning in 1901, and later Franklin in a number of his books, including, Militant South and Reconstruction: after the Civil War. The viewpoint of Dunning and his students was sympathetic to the white Southerners. who they saw as being stripped of their rights by a vengeful North after 1865. They criticized the control over the black vote by Carpetbaggers. "Dunning admits that "The legislation of the reorganized governments, under cover of police regulations and vagrancy laws, had enacted severe discriminations against the freedmen in all the common civil rights."

In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois characterized Dunning's Reconstruction, Political and Economic as a "standard, anti-Negro" text. In turn Dunning and his students generally rejected Du Bois and his Marxist interpretation of the history of Reconstruction which called for a biracial uprising of the poor against the rich.

Since the 1930's, historians have moved on. The revisionists in the 1930s emphasized that Northern capitalism was the villain. Since the 1960s historians have portrayed positive roles for the freedmen.

Books by Dunning

• Essays on the civil war and reconstruction and related topics (1897, 2nd ed. 1904) online edition
• History of Political Theories, Ancient and Mediœval (3 vol., 1902–20) vol 1 online; vol 2 online; vol 3 online
• History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu (1905)
• Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (1907) online edition
• A Sketch of Carl Schurz's Political Career, 1869-1906 (with Frederic Bancroft; 1908)
• Paying for Alaska (1912)
• The British Empire and the United States (1914)
• Studies in southern history and politics (1914) online edition
• http://books.google.com/books?q=inauthor:William+inauthor:Archibald+inauthor:Dunning&as_brr=1. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

Further reading

• Beale, Howard K. "On Rewriting Reconstruction History," American Historical Review. Vol. 45, No. 4 (Jul., 1940), pp. 807-827 in JSTOR
• Foner, Foner|Eric Foner. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. 1988.
• Du Bois, W.E.B.|W.E.B. Du Bois. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (Touchstone: 1992 reissue) p. 179-180.
• Franklin, John Hope|John Hope Franklin. "Mirror for Americans: A Century of Reconstruction History" presidential address, American Historical Association. 1979.[1]
• McCrary, Peyton. "The Reconstruction Myth" in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (University of North Carolina Press: 1989) McCrary, a historian with the United States Department of Justice taught at the University of Minnesota, Vanderbilt, and the University of South Alabama for 20 years.
• Stephenson, Wendell Holmes. South Lives in History: Southern Historians and Their Legacy (1969)
• Zeitz, Joshua. The New Republic, 18 January 1999, pp. 13-15.