Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell

Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell, 1877–1934, American historian, an authority on the antebellum South, b. La Grange, Ga. After teaching at the Univ. of Wisconsin (1902–8), he was professor of history and political science at Tulane Univ. (1908–11) and then professor of American history at the Univ. of Michigan (1911–29) and at Yale (1929–34). His doctoral dissertation, Georgia and State Rights (1902), received the Justin Winsor Prize from the American Historical Association. Phillips's works are distinguished by vast research and also by a fine literary style. American Negro Slavery (1918), which was long the standard work on the subject, is generally sympathetic to the slaveholders. Life and Labor in the Old South (1929) remains the classic account of the antebellum society and economy.

Bibliography

See W. H. Stephenson, The South Lives in History (1955, repr. 1969).