U.B. Phillips is the Gone with the Wind of slavery historiography, and he casts just as long and damaging a shadow. 1/ nytimes.com/2018/05/03/opi…
He's best known, of course, for "American Negro Slavery," which imagined slavery as an unprofitable institution in which white people looked after and "civilized" supposedly primitive Africans. 2/
As the essay rightly notes, that book dominated scholarship on American slavery and was at the heart of what schoolchildren learned for generations, critics like DuBois and other notwithstanding. 3/
Somewhat less familiar is Phillips' 1928 essay in the AHR, "The Central Theme of Southern History," in which he argued that white southerners, despite their differences, were committed to one thing above all else. 4/
They shared "a common resolve indomitably maintained--that it shall be and remain a white man's country." He was right about that. He just never should have restricted himself to the South. It's arguably the central theme of American history. 5/5
