Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning thesis and several books. He is an expert teacher and a respected scholar; is at the forefront of its field. His research methodology sets the standard for other academics. He is so esteemed, in fact, that an article prepared by him will be presented and discussed by the oldest and largest society of professional historians in the United States. These are precisely the circumstances under which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he presents a thesis that is apparently not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South was unified was not slavery as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gathered over his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into a simple enough idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study. Richard Wright wrote at the same time as Phillips, although from the opposite point of view. . Wright's essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Society. His piece is not decorated with footnotes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips' and was intended to be published as a companion to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist who complied with a publisher's request. His essay naturally has a more literary bent than Phillips', and since he was a black man writing... in the middle of paper... he is legitimate to the white supremacist cause, and is in fact personally just as as involved with the topic of his academic paper as Wright is with his less academic essay. Phillips's evidentiary support is subject to a startling caveat, which puts nearly every source to work for his purposes: “When…slavery was attacked it was defended not only as a vested interest, but…as a guarantee of white supremacy and civilization. Its defenders didn't always bother to say that this was what they mostly meant, but it can almost always be read between their lines. This has the effect of providing an assumed motive for all of his sources; Phillips' reader also begins to "read between the lines." The most worrying aspect of his article is that, in the guise of a serious historian, he distorts historical facts to fit his thesis, instead of fitting his thesis to the facts..