“Phillips came close to greatness as a historian, perhaps as close and any historian this country has produced. We may leave to those who live in the world of absolute good and evil the task of explaining how a man with such primitive views of fundamental social questions could write such splendid history. . . . He asked more and better questions than many of us still are willing to admit, and he carried on his investigations with consistent freshness and critical intelligence. . . . American Negro Slavery is not the last word on its subject; merely the indispensable first.”—Eugene D. Genovese 

Eugene Genovese , professor of history at the University of Rochester, is editor of Marxist Perspectives, a fellow of the Academy of Arts & Science, and a past president of the Organization of American Historians. His books include Roll, Jordon, Roll (for which he received a Bancroft Prize in 1975), The Political Economy of Slavery, The World the Slaveholders Made, and In Red & Black. He is also the editor of the two volumes by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips published by Louisiana State University Press, American Negro Slavery and The Slave Economy of the Old South.