Why was the Dunning School so influential

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The Dunning school still casts a shadow over America’s popular understanding of Reconstruction. Throughout the twentieth century, students heard of the victimized white southerner, a vindictive federal government and of malicious Republicans in African American controlled state legislatures. With a helpful forward by Eric Foner, John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery have edited a volume of essays investigating the historiographical impact of the Dunning School, recasting its influence on the “scientific” historical methodologies of the early twentieth century and providing historical context for a fuller understanding of Dunning’s, and that of his cadre of students’ perspectives on race. Ultimately, consistent with the explanation of C. Vann Woodward, the position of the Dunning school merely reflected attitudes already prevalent and universally accepted by a national and “regional white consensus” (7). Therefore, rather than creating new racial attitudes through myths of Reconstruction, the Dunning school was simply responsible for lending them credibility. The first two chapters set the stage for the subsequent eight by examining John Burgess and William Dunning. Shepherd McKinley describes Burgess’s work at Columbia and training in German “scientific” scholarship. Called the godfather of the Dunning school, Burgess lifted “American higher education above the realm of the amateur and toward standards of the modern and professional” (57). James Humphreys’s chapter on Dunning likewise casts him as a giant in the emerging fields of American history and political science. Humphreys’s more balanced piece clearly displays the admiration Dunning’s students had for their “genial, lovable” but “droll” advisor while also presenting Dunning, the scholar, through his personal papers and writings (93). However, both Humphreys and McKinley note that revisionists would later criticize the racism embedded in their “scientific” methodologies. Humphreys leaves us with a call to a “biographer who will treat him [Dunning] fairly, eschewing the polemical tone that has too often characterized historians’ analyses of his and his students’ scholarship” (98). W. Bland Whitley’s essay is on James Garner, perhaps one of the scholars from the Dunning school with the clearest dissonance. Described as balanced, Garner’s work Reconstruction in Mississippi displayed a “measured tone” and “willingness to present different sides of particular issues,” which was uncharacteristic of the Dunningites (112). The heroes of his work were Mississippi Whigs, who became opponents of secession and committed to Reconstruction. John David Smith’s article places U. B. Phillips as the Dunningite whose work dominated slavery scholarship until 1956. According to Smith, Phillips’s model for his own work on antebellum slavery was the “the Southerner’s unwillingness to live as political and social equals with blacks,” which was a central theme of Dunning’s Reconstruction work. Michael Fitzgerald’s article on Fleming posits him as “pro-Klan historian” whose dismissal by revisionists is fair but caused historians to miss out on Fleming’s helpful analysis of Alabama’s Reconstruction government whose “emphasis on long-standing class and regional divisions within white society” remain important (173). John Roper Sr. portrays Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton as a historian whose research methods, knowledge of Reconstruction in North Carolina and passion for archival documentation were beyond question. However, Roper asserts that Hamilton’s scholarship was firmly representative of the racism of his era and that he came to Dunning with those notions firmly established. J. Vincent Lowery describes Paul Haworth as the peripheral figure of the Dunning school largely because of his dissenting racial attitudes. A Quaker and a progressive, Haworth differed on interpretations of African Americans during Reconstruction and in so doing anticipated “the later revisionists” (222). In stark contrast, Fred Bailey’s chapter on Charles Ramsdell displays him as the corrupted “scientific historian” whose attempts at objectivity could not separate him “from the zeitgeist that enveloped his world and that corroded his supposed objectivity” (250). Paul Ortiz argues that William Davis and his study on Reconstruction in Florida ultimately helped the white citizenry of that state “avoid the hard questions about how to build a democracy in Florida,” and, according to W. E. B. Du Bois, developed an “Anti-Negro” bias there (273). Finally, William Bragg’s examination of C. Mildred Thompson and her work on Reconstruction in Georgia as “A Liberal among...

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

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 Reconstruction, to the study of the historical profession, and to the study of race, racism, and progressivism in America.

~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 School will become essential reading for anyone interested in the writing of history and the enduring meaning of Reconstruction.

~Mark Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History, University of South Carolina

The Dunning School provides important, groundbreaking studies of the authors of the first scholarly histories of Reconstruction in the southern states. Expertly introduced by John David Smith, these essays trace the careers and contributions of William Archibald Dunning himself and eight of his students, as well as those of Dunning's own mentor, John W. Burgess. It is well known that these writers collectively shaped both academic and popular interpretations of Reconstruction as a foolish, if not criminal, enterprise that deservedly failed in its attempt to guarantee full civil and political rights to emancipated slaves. But their views, and their books, were more diverse than is commonly understood, and we learn here how both the experiences of individual authors, and their adherence to the new professional ideal of "scientific" history, influenced their studies. The Dunning School is thus a significant contribution, not just to the historiography of Reconstruction, but also to southern intellectual history more broadly and to the history of the historical profession.

~J. William Harris, author of The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man's Encounter with Liberty

The idea behind this book is so good and so sensible that historians will be scanning their bookshelves, surprised that no one thought to do it before.

~Georgia Historical Quarterly

[A] dispassionate, illuminating, and well researched and a worthy monument to its subject.

~Journal of Southern History

The Dunning School is an excellent and very important study of historians and their work. Highly recommended for readers who wish to understand how Americans have remembered their past—and why.

~Blue & Gray Magazine

This collection of essays marks a valuable beginning to a reassessment of the Dunning school and a more contextual understanding of its work.

~Journal of American History

[...] The Dunning School is an interesting work on an important topic and contributes positively to a better understanding of these early twentieth century artifacts.

~Alabama Review

[...] The essays in this collection are of uniformly high quality. They offer fascinating glimpses into the academic culture of the early twentieth century, when the disciplines of history and political science were in their infancy and university faculties – outside the segregated black colleges – lily-white. They provide "warts and all" summaries of the books produced by Burgess, Dunning, and the latter's graduate students. [...]The Dunning School shows how, in the very act of rejecting the conclusions of our predecessors, we stand upon their shoulders.

~Florida Historical Quarterly