Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and World War I

Abstract

In “Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and World War I: Finding pax plantation' at Camp Gordon, Georgia,” John David Smith examines Phillips (1877-1934), who emerged as the leading historian of the South during the Progressive Era. During the First World War, Phillips served as a non-military volunteer staff officer for the Young Men's Christian Association at a boot camp in DeKalb County, Georgia, that hosted more than 9,000 African American draftees. Phillips, whose influential writings transformed him into America's most influential historian of slavery between the two world wars, took leave from the University of Michigan to finish what became his landmark book, American Negro Slavery (1918), a work that remained influential among historians until after World War II.