Du Bois corrected racist Civil War historiography on forbidden intellectual terrain

Evidence

Du Bois drew on Hegelian dialectics and Marx’s notions of class struggle to correct the interpretations of the American Civil War and its subsequent Reconstruction period grown dominant in American historiography (for instance, Woodrow Wilson’s A History of the American People ) and popular culture (Thomas Dixon’s and D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation ). Undaunted by the fact that he was already on forbidden terrain in the thinking of Hegel, Marx, and his own American contemporaries, Du Bois ventured further, uncovering the tradition. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 88

Categorization

• SEED: The contrast between Birth of a Nation’s popular racism and Du Bois’s scholarly recovery is an essay angle on who controls historical narrative.