Recent from talks
William Archibald Dunning
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
William Archibald Dunning
William Archibald Dunning (12 May 1857 – 25 August 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 Ph.D. dissertations of his numerous students.
The scholarly publications of the Dunning School have been criticized for advocating white supremacist interpretations, especially their "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 Plainfield, 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.[citation needed]
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. 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.
Dunning had a dual role in history and political science. He was a long-time editor of Political Science Quarterly. He was a leading expert in the history of political thought, as expressed in his trilogy: A History of Political Theories: Ancient and Medieval (1902), From Luther to Montesquieu (1905), and From Rousseau to Spencer (1920).
Hub AI
William Archibald Dunning AI simulator
(@William Archibald Dunning_simulator)
William Archibald Dunning
William Archibald Dunning (12 May 1857 – 25 August 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 Ph.D. dissertations of his numerous students.
The scholarly publications of the Dunning School have been criticized for advocating white supremacist interpretations, especially their "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 Plainfield, 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.[citation needed]
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. 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.
Dunning had a dual role in history and political science. He was a long-time editor of Political Science Quarterly. He was a leading expert in the history of political thought, as expressed in his trilogy: A History of Political Theories: Ancient and Medieval (1902), From Luther to Montesquieu (1905), and From Rousseau to Spencer (1920).
Recent media