Dunning School

The Dunning School was an influential early twentieth-century interpretation of Reconstruction that portrayed it as corrupt misrule by freedpeople and their allies, often depicting white Southern opponents as victims.

William Archibald Dunning: An American historian whose scholarship on Reconstruction gave its name to the Dunning School. His Columbia teaching and writing established the interpretation associated with this school.
Reconstruction era: The period after the American Civil War, when the United States addressed the former Confederacy and the status of freedpeople. This is the historical period the Dunning School interpreted as corrupt misrule.
W. E. B. Du Bois: An American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who wrote influentially about African American history. His 1935 history of Reconstruction directly challenged the school’s depiction of freedpeople and Black political leadership.
Birth of a Nation: A 1915 American silent film that depicts Reconstruction through racist stereotypes and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. The film popularized a view of Reconstruction closely aligned with Dunning-era historical writing.
Columbia University: A private research university in New York City, founded in 1754. Dunning trained scholars there whose studies spread his interpretation across the country.
Freedmen: People emancipated from slavery, especially formerly enslaved people in the United States after the Civil War. Dunning School accounts often blamed freedpeople’s political participation for Reconstruction’s alleged failures.
Eric Foner: An American historian whose scholarship focuses on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and slavery. His work synthesizes later scholarship that rejects the Dunning School’s central interpretation.
Ku Klux Klan: A white supremacist organization founded in the former Confederacy after the Civil War. Dunning School histories often cast the Klan as a response to alleged abuses by Reconstruction governments.
Reconstruction historiography: The changing historical scholarship and interpretation of Reconstruction in the United States. The Dunning School was an influential, later-challenged phase in this larger field.
Radical Republicans: A faction of Republicans who favored strong federal action to remake the postwar South and protect freedpeople’s rights. The school portrayed their policies as a cause of Southern political disorder.

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