Black Reconstruction

In his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “One cannot study Reconstruction without first frankly facing the facts of universal lying.” He denounced the Dunning School, the dominant approach to Reconstruction at the time, which denied Black achievements and celebrated white supremacy.

Nearly a century after its publication, as efforts to ban the truth from the classroom proliferate across the country, Black Reconstruction remains all too relevant. This week, the Library of America is reissuing a new edition with reflections from historians Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Reconstruction’s critical place in battles over democracy in the United States.

This reissue of Du Bois’s work coincides with the Zinn Education Project’s national report on the teaching of Reconstruction, slated for January release as part of our Teach Reconstruction campaign.

We examined K–12 state social studies standards, interviewed educators, and concluded: State standards are awful; they misrepresent Reconstruction and need to be radically transformed.

Current scholarship has discredited the lies that Du Bois exposed in 1935, but these lies still loom large in popular understandings of Reconstruction. Zinn Education Project researchers found the influence of the Dunning School in more than a dozen states’ standards and curricula.

Our Teach Reconstruction campaign offers lessons, articles, films, books, and a student project for K–12.

For your winter break, here are a few podcasts on the Reconstruction era.

If you are in D.C., visit the special exhibit on Reconstruction, Make Good the Promises, at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, through August of 2022.

Teachers are under attack for teaching truthfully about U.S. history, including Reconstruction. Please donate so that we can continue to offer free people's history lessons and resources, and defend teachers' right to use them.