Lesli White is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth with a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications and a concentration in print and online journalism. In college, she took a number of religious studies courses and harnessed her talent for storytelling. White has a rich faith background.

Leslie A. White. For White, cultural evolution was generated by technological changes, particularly with regard to the increased harnessing of energy per capita. White’s evolutionary views put him in conflict with the anti-evolutionary theories of Franz Boas and his supporters, who were then dominant in the field of cultural anthropology.

White spoke of culture as a general human phenomenon, and claimed not to speak of 'cultures' in the plural. His theory, published in 1959 in The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, rekindled the interest in social evolutionism and is counted prominently among the neoevolutionists.

It was composed of three levels: the technological, the social organizational, and the ideological. Each level rested on the previous one, and although they all interacted, ultimately the technological level was the determining one, what White calls "The hero of our piece" and "the leading character of our play".