Year Erected: 1963

Marker Text:  Dr. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, historian, author, and teacher, was born Nov. 4, 1877, in or near LaGrange. He graduated from the University of Georgia and Columbia University, earning his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1902. His Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia and State Rights, published in 1902, won the Justin Winsor Prize presented by the American Historical Association.

Phillips devoted thirty-two years of his life to teaching at some of the foremost colleges and universities of the United States: the University of Wisconsin, 1902-1908; Tulane University, 1908-1911; the University of Michigan, 1911-1929; and Yale University, 1929-1934.

Particularly known for his study of the antebellum South, Phillips emphasized the social and economic aspects of this region’s development. Among his best known works are American Negro Slavery, 1918;Life and Labor in the Old South (for which he won a $2500 Little. Brown Prize), 1929; and The Course of the South to Secession, 1939. He was the first historian to make extensive use of original plantation records.

Phillips died Jan. 21, 1934, in New Haven. Conn. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown. N.Y.