Harry Elmer Barnes: When Good Historians Go Bad

If you were to examine the field of historians in the 1920s and 1930s for the most prominent and respected people you would find Harry Elmer Barnes (1889-1968). Barnes studied history under William Archibald Dunning, a history professor whose views on Reconstruction were, to say the least, highly negative. In 1918, Barnes became a professor and taught h…