Life and Labor in the Old South - Paperback

by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (Author), John David Smith (Introduction by)

Celebrated as a classic work of historical literature, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929) represents the culmination of three decades of research and reflection on the social and economic systems of the antebellum South by the leading historian of African American slavery of the first half of the twentieth century. Life and Labor in the Old South represents both the strengths and weaknesses of first-rate scholarship by whites on the topics of antebellum African and African American slavery during the Jim Crow era. Deeply researched in primary sources, carefully focused on social and economic facets of slavery, and gracefully written, Phillips's germinal account set the standard for his contemporaries. Simultaneously the work is rife with elitism, racism, and reliance on sources that privilege white perspectives. Such contradictions between its content and viewpoint have earned Life and Labor in the Old South its place at the forefront of texts in the historiography of the antebellum South and African American slavery. The book is both a work of high scholarship and an example of the power of unexamined prejudices to affect such a work.

Author Biography

John David Smith is the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His previous books include Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: A Southern Historian and His Critics; An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918; and Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and "The American Negro," which received the Mayflower Society Award for Nonfiction in 2000.