Any examination of race as a formative influence on the American South must first acknowledge the interpretation advanced decades ago by the putative founder of southern history as a field of study: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. A Georgia-born Progressive and author of the first scholarly account of slavery to gain widespread acceptance in the national academy, Phillips surveyed the otherwise wrenching journey from Old South to New and found continuity in the timeless commitment of white southerners to the common cause of white supremacy. Phillips insisted that the" central theme" of southern history was" a single resolve indomitably maintained" that the South" was and shall remain a white man's country." 1 Long before the recent interpretive bent of cultural history refocused scholarly attention upon culturally and historically constructed definitions of race as critical factors shaping American society, Phillips posited a shared allegiance to white supremacy as the central theme of southern history and established an interpretation that would remain both influential and controversial for the remainder of the twentieth century. 2 During the 1990s, practitioners of the new cultural history, influenced by anthropological research and the techniques of literary postmodernism, have maintained that most American historiography fails to account