Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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

Life

His father was a northern merchant and his mother came from a southern plantation family. Phillips went to school in New Orleans and studied history at the University of Georgia with a bachelor's degree in 1897 and a master's degree in 1899. He also studied a summer semester in 1898 at the University of Chicago with Frederick Jackson Turner . In 1902 he received his PhD from Columbia University under William Archibald Dunning , who directed a school of historians of the Reconstruction era. His Georgia and State Rights dissertation received the Justin Winsor Prize and has been published by the American Historical Association . From 1902 to 1908 he taught at the University of Wisconsin – Madison . After he had been visiting professor at Tulane University in the fall of 1907 , 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 still intended to write books about the Civil War and its prehistory, as well as the modern southern United States, but died in 1934 of throat cancer.

In his early work he advocated the thesis that slave labor in the south was unprofitable and generally detrimental to the economy in the southern states, as the south therefore lagged behind in the industrial revolution. He systematically evaluated southern sources such as the bookkeeping of plantations. He is best known 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 southern states and compared it with that in the Caribbean. But he was also accused of a conservative, tendentially racist interpretation of slavery, because he did not see it as a brutal system of exploitation, but as a mutual dependency between slave and owner, which resulted in reciprocal codes of behavior of conventional morality .

Because of his book from 1929, he became a Fellow of the Albert Kahn Foundation in 1929/30 .

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

Fonts

• 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
• Editors: 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
• Editors: 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 , 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, Eugene Genovese, Louisiana State University Press 1968
• Economic and Political Essays on the Ante-Bellum South, New York: B. Franklin 1970

literature

• Merton L. Dillon: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: Historian of the Old South , Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985
• John Herbert Roper: UB Phillips: A Southern Mind , Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1984
• John David Smith: An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918 , Westport, Conn .: Greenwood Press, 1985
• John David Smith, John C. Inscoe (editors): Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: A Southern Historian and His Critics , Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1990

Web links

• Georgia Encyclopedia