Talk:Ulrich B. Phillips

message: The following blockquote has been removed from this article for cause.
What is the justification for placing this long passage here? Is it online? Can it be linked to? Can it be summarized?
Please cite other examples where passages this long are quoted anywhere in Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia.
In addition, please provide citations for the following words in the POV introduction to the passage.
If it is influential, please state who says that that it is. Please provide documentation that "most historians" accept the following claim. Skywriter 12:04, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Please defend use of this long passage in encyclopedia

message: These sentences were removed because they are original resarch and POV. Please cite source for these statements or do not return them to the article. 
"In use of sources and in interretations, he was one of the most influential historians of his era."
"The international perspective was an innovation decades ahead of its time. His basic arguments—the duality of slavery as an economic drag on the economy and society,"
Thank you. Skywriter 05:58, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No original research--very unlikely in view of the vast historiography about Phillips. I mostly used the two dozen articles collected in Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: A Southern Historian and His Critics. ed by JD Smith & John C. Inscoe (1990).Thus "few historians used plantation records sparingly before Phillips became their chief consultant; he was the first scholar to make them a major source of information." (p. 23); "Phillips went on to break fresh analytical ground in economic, social, and political history. He mastered the available sources in southern history and uncovered rich new collections of plantation materials for later generations of 
scholars." (p. 11)
#"international": Woodward and Smith suggest he was an early exponent of a comparative approach--"comparative" is a better word that "international". (Smith: "his use of the comparative method to examine slavery in the West Indies offered a fresh perspective to American historians." ibid p, 3 also Smith, John David. “U. B. Phillips's World Tour and the Study of Comparative Plantation Societies.” Yale University Library Gazette 1994 68(3-4): 157-168.)  
#Is he important? (Smith: "Does Phillips deserve all this attention? Unquestionably yes. Ironically today's historians of slavery owe a tremendous debt to this racist, white southern historian. Although we may not wish to admit it, Herbert G. Gutman was correct: Phillips continues to dictate the manner in which many historians approach the study of slavery. His works remain the standard against which we judge the new scholarship on slavery." p 10) Also: Smith: "Kenneth M. Stampp has admitted that "In their day the writings of Ulrich B. Phillips on slavery were both highly original and decidedly revisionist." "He was about as objective as the rest of us," asserted Stampp at the meeting of the Southern Historical Association in 1982." (p. 10)  Also Smith: "From the vantage point of the three historiographic cycles presented here, Phillips's contributions to the study of slavery clearly outweigh his deficiencies. Neither saint nor sinner, he was subject to the same forces-- bias, selectivity of evidence, inaccuracy--that plague us all. Descended from slave owners and reared in the rural South, he dominated slave historiography in an era when Progressivism was literally for whites only. Of all scholars, historians can ill afford to be anachronistic. Phillips was no more a believer in white supremacy than other leading contemporary white scholars." Rjensen 06:27, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: happy to oblige--but all the material was already in the published sources, and people who really care about the topic should read some of them. Rjensen 09:35, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

text: The quote was by Smith, and so I set it off properly. The proposition about Central Theme is not at all POV --who disagrees? Rjensen 23:34, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

text: I documented with citations from big names like McPherson--and please don't pretend to be a black who bashes white boys. It's unbecoming for a Wiki editor.Rjensen 00:15, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: No original research, No POV

message: Rjensen and I dispute what the lead should be. Rjensen contends that the views of this early 20th century historian continue to influence historical writing. And yet, link after link demonstrates that Phillips's views have been widely rejected because he wrote from a deeply racist perspective, based on plantation manuscripts that ignored but claimed to interpret African American culture. Phillips's point that slaves were happy and that the system of slavery benefited them, and that slave holders allowed the economic slave system to continue because they were benevolent. No serious historian accepts these views anymore. My dispute with Rjensen in this matter is his selective and truncated use of quotes to make the point that Phillips was a great historian still revered today. The cited articles show exactly the opposite. My point is he was influential in his time when racist historiography was acceptable to white textbook purveyors but these views have not survived in the second half of the 20th century and much less the 21st century. At this point, it would be wise to solicit the opinions of other Wikipedia editors to settle how this article should be presented.
It is also my contention that some of the long quotes in this article can be summarized. Skywriter 12:20, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Quote after quote says that Phillips defined the field. Yes his POV has been rejected but quote after quote shows his great importance. As for POV I think Skywriter has a deep animus against Phillips that is dangerous for an editor trying to create a NPOV article. Note that many of the leading historians of slavery South are quoted here which shows his importance. Rjensen 12:27, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Request for opinions of other Wikipedia editors

message: The problem with Dillon's screed is that he is talking about what Phillips did not write about: the inner culture of the slave community.  Dillon is of course exaggerating--or else Dillon did not notice that the Blacks on the plantation adopted white traits like language & religion, and after emancipation joined Baptist and Methodist churches and the Republican party. Rjensen 12:50, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's bad editing to search for nasty things to say about people whose biases one does he not share. That is not the way to build a NPOV encyclopedia. Nor is quoting an encyclopedia rather than summarizing the article itself the way to lead the article. Let's ask, why have so many serious historians of slavery discussed Phillips at such length of he is so unimportant.(Woodward, Fogel, Genovese, Stampp, Gutman, Potter, Sitkoff, etc.) Did Phillips shape the field? Ask Frederickson and Lasch: "The critics of Phillips have tried to meet him on his own ground."  Ask Vann Woodward: "Much of what Phillips wrote has not been superseded or seriously challenged and remains indispensable" Ask Herbert Gutman: "Critics, including such able scholars as (E. Franklin) Frazier, Kenneth M. Stampp, and Stanley M. Elkins, sharply rejected the racial assumptions of Phillips and his followers but focused on the same question." Ask Genovese (in his Marxist days): "his work, taken as a whole, remains the best and most subtle introduction to antebellum Southern history and especially to the problems posed by race and class."  Ask David Brion Davis: "The most comprehensive study of North American slavery is still Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918), which needs to be supplemented by Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South ( New York, 1956)." Ask Howard Sitkoff: "Today, as in Phillips's lifetime, scholars again commonly acknowledge the value of many of his insights into the nature of the southern class structure and master-slave relationships."  How much more evidence is needed that Phillips shaped the debate??? Rjensen 13:10, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dillon 

message: Rjsensen has returned to this article numerous times to change the fact that Genovese is a well-known conservative historian who dallied with Marxism when he was much younger. As the Wikipedia article on Genovese documents, this man is not a Marxist. Rjensen's continued reverts to his POV claim that Genovese is a Marxist underlines my doubts that Rjensen is pushing his own viewpoint, which is avowedly conservative. Accuracy is important and facts are not just matters of convenience. The fact that Rjensen repeatedly reverts and deletes the correction that Genovese is and has been a conservative for 40 years is in part the basis of the fact and POV tags on this article. When other editors come to this page, I hope this will be looked at. Skywriter 13:34, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: actually Genovese was probably the leading Marxist intellectual in the US in the 1960s, when the quotes originated, For example, he edited Marxist Perspectives where many leading Marxists published. Of course Genovese is the leading historian of plantation slavery in the last 50 years, but no matter to Skywriter.  The problem here is that Skywriter has a bitter hatred of conservative historians (like Phillips) and uses every chance to demean and ridicule them. That is a very serious flaw for an editor seeking to achieve an NPOV article. Rjensen 03:49, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Obviously this talk page dispute ended a long time ago, but it's strange seeing Genovese described as having merely "dallied with Marxism when he was much younger." Genovese's most influential works (including his essays on Phillips) were written when he was an avowed Marxist, and he only started identifying as a conservative when he was in his 60s (which, back in 2006, meant less than 15 years, not 40.) One can certainly critique Genovese's understanding of Marxism and how he used it when analyzing US history, but to call it a youthful dalliance just seems ignorant. --Ismail (talk) 09:18, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

text: Skywriter simply hates conservative historians. That is not allowed. Skywriter apparently has not read a single book or article by Phillips and yet seems to think he's qualified to edit the biography. I think it is true that African American historians expressed disappointment that his emphasis on the material well being of the slaves diverted attention from the slaves' own cultural constructs and efforts to achieve freedom. -- I actually read the reviews in the Jorunal of Negro History in the 1920s era that prove that. The fact that white historians decades later took up the same argument should not trump simple statements of fact. Genovese's quotes in 1950s-1970s came when he was a leading Marxist. Rjensen 05:00, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Genovese is not a Marxist and hasn't been for 40 years

message: Here's my draft for an introduction: does anyone see a problem??  Skywriter says it's too favorable toward a conservative historian.
:Phillips concentrated on the large plantations that dominated the Southern economy, neglecting the large number of smaller farms that employed a few slaves. He concluded that plantation slavery produced great wealth, but was a dead end, economically, that left the South bypassed by the industrial revolution underway in the North. On the whole plantation slavery was not very profitable, he said, had about reached its limits in 1860, and would probably have faded away without the American Civil War, which he considered needless. He praised the plantation owners and denied they were brutal, arguing they provided adequate food, clothing, housing, medical care and training in modern technology--that they were a school "civilized" the slaves. He admitted the failure was that no one graduated from this school. Phillips systematically hunted down and opened plantation records and unused manuscript sources. An example of pioneering comparative work was "A Jamaica Slave Plantation" (1914). His methods and use of sources shaped the research agenda of most succeeding scholars, even thouse who disagreed with his favorable treatment of the masters. African American historians expressed disappointment that his emphasis on the material well being of the slaves diverted attention from the slaves' own cultural constructs and efforts to achieve freedom. By turning away from the political debates about slavery that divided North and South, Phillips made the economics and social structure of slavery the main theme in 20th century scholarship. Together with his highly eloquent writing style, his new approach made him the most influential historian of the ante-bellum south. His interpretation of white supremacy as the "central theme of southern history" remains one of the main interpretations of Southern history.
Here is the alernative introduction copied from an encyclopedia. Does anyine think it tells us more? 
:"Today historians remember Phillips as a path-breaking scholar, as a pioneer in the use of plantation and other southern manuscript sources, as the inspiration for the "Phillips school" of state slavery studies, and as a conservative, proslavery interpreter of slavery and the slaves." 
Rjensen 05:42, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  another challenge--pick the richer, more detailed, more helpful into