The Atlanta Connection: C. Mildred Thompson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Reconstruction Historiography Open Access
Polatsek, Annika (Spring 2023)
Abstract
While modern historians reject it, the Dunning School continues to inform the American public’s memory of Reconstruction. In the early twentieth century when white Americans used historical memory as a means of reconciliation between the North and South, the Columbia University cohort gained national recognition. Atlanta was at the center of the construction of this historical memory. C. Mildred Thompson and W.E.B. Du Bois, two historians with ties to Atlanta, both wrote monographs on Reconstruction, though vastly different in their interpretations. Du Bois presented Reconstruction as a push towards true democracy in which African Americans played a pivotal role, whereas Thompson and her Dunning School peers centered racist Lost Cause ideology, which vindicated the South’s side in the Civil War as noble and worthy of a continued fight. In tracking the engagements of Thompson and Du Bois without and within the historical profession, with one another, and their respective connections to Atlanta, this thesis argues that while racist scholarship informed and continues to inform public perception, Black scholars contested it long before the emergence of revisionist historians in the 1950-60s. Du Bois defined what it meant, in Atlanta and on the nation’s stage, to stand up to the hegemony of white supremacy.
This thesis examines how historians with opposite viewpoints interact with one another and how the historiography, especially relating to a politically relevant topic, changes slowly and only with great effort. The aim of this thesis is to distinguish historiographical traditions to show that a counternarrative to the Dunning School existed before and inspired so-called revisionist historians in the latter half of the twentieth century. The first chapter covers Thompson and her monograph, the second Du Bois and his monograph, and the third chapter details the effects of revisionism on the profession. Historicizing historiography reveals how scholarly consensus evolves in response to social and political changes. In telling the parallel stories and analyzing the intersecting scholarship of Thompson and Du Bois, The Atlanta Connection: C. Mildred Thompson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Reconstruction Historiography illustrates the transformation of historiography and the historical profession in the twentieth century.
Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................1
1. “Truth in History:” Thompson, Atlanta, and the Lost Cause Myth....................................10
2.Revising History: Du Bois’s Journey From Atlanta to Black Reconstruction.......................33
3.Passing the Torch: The Profession’s Responses to Thompson and Du Bois.......................59
Conclusion....................................................................................................................82
Bibliography..................................................................................................................86
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