Editing Reconstruction era (section)

===Dunning School, 1900s–1920s===
The [[Dunning School]] of scholars, who were trained at the history department of [[Columbia University]] under Professor [[William A. Dunning]], analyzed Reconstruction as a failure after 1866 for different reasons. They claimed that Congress took freedoms and rights from qualified Whites and gave them to unqualified Blacks who were being duped by what they called "corrupt carpetbaggers and scalawags". As [[T. Harry Williams]] (who was a sharp critic of the Dunning School) noted, the Dunning scholars portrayed the era in stark terms:{{sfnp|Williams|1946|p=473}}
{{blockquote|1=Reconstruction was a battle between two extremes: the Democrats, as the group which included the vast majority of the whites, standing for decent government and racial supremacy, versus the Republicans, the Negroes, alien carpetbaggers, and renegade scalawags, standing for dishonest government and alien ideals. These historians wrote literally in terms of white and black.}}