Du Bois deliberately adopted orthodox historical methods to overturn racist historiography from within.

Evidence

Du Bois, however, had not neglected the play of history, its scenario. He had intended to—and did—trace the critical phenomenology of the American Civil War and its aftermath, the Reconstruction. From his research there emerged a fundamentally revised construction of those periods that stood as a critique of American historiography with its racial biases, domineering regionalisms, and distorting philosophical commitments. Methodologically, moreover, Black Reconstruction possessed a rigor consciously designed to match and supersede Ulrich B. Phillips’s earlier “classic” work on slavery, American Negro Slavery. Du Bois, in his attempt to authoritatively identify what he took to be the truer character of the Reconstruction era, seems to have realized the necessity of returning to the experience and training in historical research and writing he had gathered at Harvard University and the University of Berlin in the late nineteenth century but had eschewed in John Brown. His radical, and radically different interpretation of the war and its aftermath would conform formally to the methodological canons of historiography so that he might subvert the substance of that tradition. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 911

Categorization

• SEED: A possible essay angle: the strategy of mastering a discipline’s formal conventions in order to dismantle its substantive ideology from inside.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School studies of method-as-proxy for substantive ideological conflict seen earlier in reader’s history.