What I will do here is assemble a short reading list about Reconstruction. Named after Columbia historian William Dunning, the “Dunning School” has become synonymous with a viewpoint of the Reconstruction period as a disaster for the South and the nation due to “black rule” in the region by recently freed Black Americans, seemingly unfit for politics and democracy. Clinton’s comments are seen as an extension of the old “Dunning School” of thought on Reconstruction. Rancor and political incivility, while part of the history of Reconstruction in the South, were not the center of that story. Where she argues that the era could have used “a little less rancor,” historians of the period see an American South filled both with a radical democratic promise and a region gripped by reactionary violence. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s recent comments on the Reconstruction era have, to say the least, raised the eyebrows of historians who study the time period.
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