William Archibald Dunning (12 May 1857 – 25 August 1922)[1] was an American historian and political scientist at Columbia University noted for his work on the Reconstruction era of the United States.
His students included men who became leading scholars and academic entrepreneurs, such as Charles Merriam, Harry Elmer Barnes, James Wilford Garner and Carlton J. H. Hayes.
Thompson drafted the charter for UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization), and worked for civil rights in Atlanta.
Those who wrote dissertations on Reconstruction included James W. Garner, Walter Lynwood Fleming, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Charles W. Ramsdell, C. Mildred Thompson, William Watson Davis, and Thomas S.
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.
"[14] Bradley notes that the Dunning interpretation in the 1930s and 1940s also "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.
Dunning and his followers portrayed former planters, the elite political, social and economic class, as honorable people with the South's best interests in mind.
"[4][17]: x–xi Dunning referred to freedmen as "barbarous" and defended the racist black codes as "a conscientious and straightforward attempt to bring some sort of order" out of the aftermath of war and emancipation.
Dunning wrote that the freedmen were not "on the same social, moral and intellectual plane with the whites" and that "restrictions in respect to bearing arms, testifying in court, and keeping labor contracts were justified by the well-established traits and habits of the negroes[.
Du Bois noted, "Dunning admits that "The legislation of the reorganized governments, under cover of police regulations and vagrancy laws, had enacted severe discrimination against the freedmen in all the common civil rights.
Beale says the Dunning School broke new ground by escaping the political polemics of the day and used "meticulous and thorough research [...] in an effort to determine the truth rather than prove a thesis.
In keeping with European ideas about history "from the bottom up" and the agency of all classes of people, together with new research, they documented the place of African Americans at the center of Reconstruction.