The Dunning School argued that Reconstruction was the most calamitous and corrupt period in the nation’s history because imperialistic Radical Republicans empowered riotous, sub-human blacks to rule over the respectable white South. In his effort to transform how people thought about the Civil War and Reconstruction-in telling his story “as though Negroes were ordinary human beings”-Du Bois ran headlong into a legion of white historians who worked in lockstep with Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning and his followers, including Woodrow Wilson. Most obviously, the book overturned the notoriously racist Dunning School. Black Reconstruction revises history in several ways. It won’t be the last.īlack Reconstruction in America is the definitive revisionist text in African American history and, arguably, American history more broadly. This is not the first time that Black Reconstruction has been put to good use. Du Bois’s 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America. MSNBC pundit Chris Hayes has declared that books about Reconstruction are “all of what I’m reading.” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, to make sense of Trump’s racist and nativist appeals, has blogged his way through W. They seem to think the era of Reconstruction, when tangible racial progress was realized only to be wrecked by white revanchists, speaks to the present. To decipher Donald Trump’s election, several gobsmacked liberal journalists have been reading about Reconstruction. Du Bois at the grave of Karl Marx, September 1958
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