The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and Meaning of Reconstruction. Edited by John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery. Foreword by Eric Foner. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. xii, 325. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-4225-8.) Once upon a time, Professor William A. Dunning and his students bestrode Reconstruction history like a colossus. Depicting a tragic era where northern radicals pressed tyranny and alien rule upon a white South, Dunningites gave scholarly backing to conservatives who had pronounced emancipation at best a mixed blessing and black suffrage quintessence of wickedness or folly. Academic tides have washed away all Dunningites' preconceptions and most of their conclusions, and with it memory of writers themselves. Now The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and Meaning of Reconstruction restores attention, even some of credit, that they deserve. More fitly titled the Dunning Scholars, this essay collection highlights ten historians' lives and careers. It makes extremely useful points: that all of them began with preconceptions based on their upbringing and heritage, and that they had long, often impressive careers after their Columbia University dissertations appeared as books. All historians owe J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton an immense debt for creation of Southern Historical Collection at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, even those revising his take on Reconstruction North Carolina. Superseded though Charles W. Ramsdell's Reconstruction in Texas (New York, 1910) may be, his inspiration and encouragement for History of South series created works that, more than a half century on, include a few of indispensables--and reflect Ramsdell's own leanings not at all. The Dunningites' views ranged from racial paternalism to Negrophobia; their attitudes on Ku Klux Klan went from celebration of its members as freedom fighters to outright denunciation of their violence in Paul Leland Haworth's book on election of 1876--a stance that helped make him a virtual un-person among Dunningites' most unbending white-liners. Most of books had real value. They brought together basic facts and unearthed fresh materials. Many have not yet been fully replaced. Even John W. Burgess and Dunning himself combined insights and strong, dispassionate evaluations with malevolent fulminations: unfitness of any but Teutonic races to rule or that a certain radical leader took opium, respectively. Generally, essays make a good case for honoring scholars' strengths as well as recognizing defects in their analysis. Those few contributors with practical research experience in Reconstruction history are more forthright about just what their subjects misunderstood or misstated: Michael W. Fitzgerald's analysis of Walter L. Fleming's personal contempt for northerners and blacks only sets stage for a measured judgment of Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (New York, 1905), which, with all its perceptions of class and sectional divisions among whites in wartime Alabama, was a work so extreme that Dunning felt mildly uneasy with it. In other essays, so much time is spent on rest of subject's career that comparatively little space illuminates Reconstruction writings. The Dunning school, as this study reminds us anew, did not create misimpression of Reconstruction as a phantasmagoria of tyranny, incompetence, corruption, and Negro rule. What Dunning and his students did do was use techniques of scientific research to confirm impressions already prevalent. …