Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips ( * November 4, 1877 in LaGrange, Georgia, † January 21, 1934 ) was an American historian. He was regarded as a leading historian of the American South and of slavery in the United States.

Life

His father was a merchant with Northern States background, his mother came from a Southern plantation owner's family. Phillips went to New Orleans to school and studied history at the University of Georgia with a bachelor 's degree in 1897 and a master's degree 1899. Doing so, he also studied a summer semester 1898 at the University of Chicago in Frederick Jackson Turner. In 1902 he received his doctorate at Columbia University with William Archibald Dunning, who ran a school of historians of the Reconstruction era. His dissertation Georgia and State Rights was awarded the Justin Winsor Prize and was published by the American Historical Association. From 1902 to 1908 he taught at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. After he had been 1907 guest professor at Tulane University in the fall, he became professor there in 1908. In 1911 he moved to the University of Michigan. In 1929 he became a professor at Yale University. He intended nor books about the Civil War and its history and the modern southern United States to write, but died in 1934 of throat cancer.

In his early works he defended the thesis that slavery in the South was unprofitable and the overall economy in the Southern harmful as the South therefore lagged behind in the Industrial Revolution. He evaluated systematically southern sources such as the accounting records of plantations. He is known especially for his works American Negro Slavery (1918 ) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929 ) in which he analyzed the slave economy in the South and compared with that in the Caribbean. But He has been accused of not seeing them as a brutal system of exploitation, but had, as a mutual dependency ratio of slave and owner, the reciprocal behavioral codes of conventional morality result in a conservative, tend to be racist interpretation of slavery.

Based on his book of 1929 he was 1929/30, a Fellow of the Albert Kahn Foundation.

He was married to Lucie Mayo -Smith since 1911 and had three children.

Writings

  • Georgia and State Rights; A Study of the Political History of Georgia from the Revolution to the Civil War, with Particular Regard to Federal Relations. American Historical Association Report for the Year 1901, Vol 2 United States Government Printing Office, 1902
  • Transportation in the Antebellum South: An Economic Analysis, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 19, 1905, pp. 434-458.
  • History of the Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860, 1908, New York 1968
  • Publisher: Plantation and Frontier Documents 1649-1863; Illustrative of Industrial History in the Colonial and Antebellum South: Collected from MSS. and Other Rare Sources, 2 Volumes, Arthur H. Clark 1909
  • Publisher: The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens and Howell Cobb, Washington 1913
  • The Life of Robert Toombs, Macmillan, 1913
  • The Origin and Growth of the Southern Black Belts, American Historical Review, Volume 11, 1906, pp. 798-816
  • American Negro Slavery. A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime, New York, London: D. Appleton and Company, 1918, Project Gutenberg, new edition Louisiana State University Press 1966
  • The central theme of Southern History, American Historical Review, Volume 34, 1928, pp. 30-43
  • Life and Labor in the Old South, Boston: Little, Brown and Company 1929
  • The course of the South to secession; an interpretation, New York, London: Appleton Century 1939 ( editor E. Merlton Coulter)
  • Slave Economy of the Old South: Selected Essays in Economic and Social History, published by Eugene Genovese, Louisiana State University Press 1968
  • Economic and Political Essays on the Ante - Bellum South, New York: B. Franklin, 1970
Georgia (U.S. state) Union (American Civil War) Integrated Authority File
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