Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois

Woodrow Wilson's Division and Reunion, 1829–1889 (1893), and James Ford Rhodes' History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1906) denigrated African-American contributions during that period, reflecting attitudes of white supremacy in a period when most blacks and many poor whites had been disfranchised across the South. He contended there were no benefits from Reconstruction.

A view had collected around James Pike's work, The Prostrate State (1878), written shortly after Reconstruction ended. The academic consensus at this time portrayed black enfranchisement and Reconstruction governments in the south as a failure. The essay was published in the July 1910 issue of The American Historical Review, but had little influence at the time. William Archibald Dunning, leader of what was called the Dunning School that developed at Columbia University, heard Du Bois' presentation and praised his paper, according to Du Bois.

Albert Bushnell Hart, one of his former professors at Harvard University, sent him money to attend the conference. He wrote a more extensive essay on the topic entitled 'Reconstruction and Its Benefits', which was first delivered to the American Historical Association in December 1909 in New York City. He also wrote about Reconstruction in his 1924 book The Gift of Black Folk.

Du Bois instead emphasized the agency of Black people and freed slaves during the Civil War and Reconstruction and framing the period as one that held promise for a worker-ruled democracy to replace a slavery-based plantation economy.ĭu Bois' first published writing on Reconstruction was a 1901 Atlantic Monthly essay entitled 'The Freedmen's Bureau', which was reprinted as the essay 'Of the Dawn of Freedom' in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. The book challenged the standard academic view of Reconstruction at the time, the Dunning School, which contended that the period was a failure and downplayed the contributions of African Americans. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 is a history of the Reconstruction era by W.

Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois