William Archibald Dunning, historian, political scientist, teacher, and editor of scholarly journals, was a major figure among the first generation of professionally trained American historians. While a professor at Columbia University from 1886 until his death in 1922. Dunning exerted, through his own work and that of his many students, a lasting influence on historical scholarship in the United States. Although his most ambitious work was an epic study of political philosophy, Dunning's interpretation of the Reconstruction period following the American Civil War was his most enduring contribution to historical knowledge and dominated public and scholarly views of the Reconstruction era for more than half a century.

Dunning, son of John H. and Catherine D. Trelease Dunning, was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, four years prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War. John Dunning, a carriage manufacturer, amateur painter, and art critic, was a man of wide intellectual...