Dunning School
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The Dunning School refers to 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.
Profile
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. The views of the Dunning School dominated scholarly and popular depictions of the era from about 1900 to the 1930s. Adam Fairclough, a British historian whose expertise includes Reconstruction, summarized the Dunningite themes:
{{quote|All agreed that black suffrage had been a political blunder and that the Republican state governments in the South that rested upon black votes had been corrupt, extravagant, unrepresentative, and oppressive. The sympathies of the "Dunningite" historians lay with the white Southerners who resisted Congressional Reconstruction: whites who, organizing under the banner of the Conservative or Democratic Party, used legal opposition and extralegal violence to oust the Republicans from state power. Although "Dunningite" historians did not necessarily endorse those extralegal methods, they did tend to palliate them. From start to finish, they argued, Congressional Reconstruction—often dubbed "Radical Reconstruction"—lacked political wisdom and legitimacy.
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).
- J. S. 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).
