From the past due 19th century until eventually global struggle I, a gaggle of Columbia collage scholars accumulated less than the mentorship of the popular historian William Archibald Dunning (1857--1922). referred to as the Dunning college, those scholars wrote the 1st new release of country reviews at the Reconstruction -- volumes that regularly sympathized with white southerners, interpreted radical Reconstruction as a mean-spirited usurpation of federal energy, and forged the Republican social gathering as a coalition of carpetbaggers, freedmen, scalawags, and previous Unionists.

Edited through the award-winning historian John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, The Dunning School specializes in this debatable staff of historians and its scholarly output. regardless of their methodological obstacles and racial bias, the Dunning historians' writings prefigured the assets and questions that later historians of the Reconstruction might make the most of and tackle. lots of their pioneering dissertations stay vital to ongoing debates at the huge that means of the Civil conflict and Reconstruction and the evolution of yank historic scholarship.

This groundbreaking number of unique essays deals a good and significant overview of the Dunning tuition that specializes in the group's goal, the strengths and weaknesses of its materials, and its legacy. Squaring the prior with the current, this crucial ebook additionally explores the evolution of historic interpretations over the years and illuminates the ways that modern political, racial, and social questions form ancient analyses.