William Archibald Dunning
| William Archibald Dunning | |
|---|---|
| Born | William Archibald Dunning May 12, 1857 Plainfield, New Jersey |
| Died | August 25, 1922 (aged 65) |
| Alma mater | Columbia University(B.A., M.A., Ph.D. ) |
| Influences | Heinrich von Treitschke |
| Influenced | Charles Merriam, Harry Elmer Barnes, James Wilford Garner, Carlton J. H. Hayes, Walter Lynwood Fleming, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Charles W. Ramsdell |
William Archibald Dunning (May 12, 1857 in Plainfield, New Jersey – August 25, 1922) was an American historian and political scientist at Columbia University noted for his work on the Reconstruction era of the United States. He founded the informal Dunning School of interpreting the Reconstruction era through his own writings and the PhD dissertations of his numerous students. Historian Howard K. Beale was a leader of the "revisionist" school of the 1930s that broke with the Dunning interpretation. 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." Beale states that, "The emphasis of the Dunning school was upon the harm done to the South by Radical Reconstruction and on the sordid political and economic motives behind Radicalism." However, Dunning has also been criticized for his "blatant use of the discipline of history for reactionary ends" and for offering "scholarly legitimacy to the disenfranchisement of southern blacks and to the Jim Crow system."
Born in New Jersey, Dunning was the son of a successful businessman who enjoyed the classics. Dunning earned degrees at Columbia University (B.A. 1881, M.A. 1884, and Ph.D. 1885). He spent a year in Berlin studying European history under Heinrich von Treitschke.
Soon after his return and beginning his academic career, in 1888 he married Charlotte E. Loomis. They had no children. She died in 1917.
Dunning began teaching at Columbia and was steadily promoted on the academic ladder (fellow, lecturer, instructor, adjunct professor, and full professor); in 1903 he was appointed as the Francis Lieber Professor of History and Political Philosophy.
He published his PhD dissertation, The Constitution of the United States in Civil War and Reconstruction: 1860–1867 (1897), at age 40 after he had been teaching for several years.
His scholarly essays, collected in Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics, (1897), included work that explained the legal basis for the destruction of slavery, an institution he opposed. His survey Reconstruction, Political and Economic: 1865–1877 (1907), for the "American Nation" series, set the tone. The Essays were path-breaking. Dunning believed that his Reconstruction book was too superficial. He felt that it had distracted him from his major work on the history of political theory.
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