First published in 1931, the author exposes the commercial aspects of slave trading, including the breeding and rearing of slaves for sale to Western territories. The author shows antebellum slavery to be commercial, exploitative and cruel rather than a benevolent peculiar institution

First published in 1950 and long sought by collectors and historians, South Carolina Goes to War, 1860-1865 stands as the only institutional and political history of the Palmetto State's secession from the Union, entry into the Confederacy, and management of the war effort. Charles Edward Cauthen's germinal study offers a thorough examination of the state's political leadership and policymaking during the secession crisis and the subsequent four years of war. Notable for its attention to the precursors of war too often neglected in other studies, the volume devotes half of its chapters to...

A social scientist and public intellectual, Arthur Raper (1899-1979) advocated unpopular solutions to combat the shortcomings of race relations and economic stagnation in the South. Originally published in 1936, Preface to Peasantry confirmed Raper's place in the Chapel Hill Southern Regionalist movement of the 1930s and 1940s and elaborated his belief that New Deal federal planning could create progressive social policies. Adroitly juxtaposing themes of history and sociology, Preface to Peasantry is a text both descriptive of a broad phenomenon and prescriptive of policymaking to address the...

The Southern Literary Messenger enjoyed an impressive thirty-year run (1834-1864) and was in its time the South's most important literary periodical. Published in Richmond, Virginia, the monthly magazine was edited in its early years by Edgar Allan Poe. In addition to serving as a literary proving ground for Poe, it is also remembered for publishing poems, fiction, and essays by the nation's leading authors-both male and female, northern and southern-including William Gilmore Simms, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Joseph G. Baldwin, John Pendleton Kennedy, Mary E. Lee, and Caroline Lee Hentz. In 1905...

Celebrated as a classic work of historical literature, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929) represents the culmination of three decades of research and reflection on the social and economic systems of the antebellum South by the leading historian of African American slavery of the first half of the twentieth century. Life and Labor in the Old South represents both the strengths and weaknesses of first-rate scholarship by whites on the topics of antebellum African and African American slavery during the Jim Crow era. Deeply researched in primary sources, carefully focused on social and...

Kurt Vonnegut s death on April 11, 2007, marked the passing of a major force in American life and letters. Jerome Klinkowitz, one of the earliest and most prolific authorities on Vonnegut, examines the long dialogue between the author and American culture a conversation that produced fourteen novels and hundreds of short stories and essays. Spanning Vonnegut s half-century literary career, Kurt Vonnegut s America integrates discussion of myriad fiction, essays, and lectures with personal exchanges and biographical sketches to map the complex symbiotic relationship between Vonnegut s work and...

A germinal case study of the antebellum cotton kingdom as it manifested itself in the Deep South

First full publication of Edgar Thompson's 1932 dissertation on the economics of the plantation.

A rare classic in American social science, Edgar Thompson's 1932 University of Chicago dissertation, "The Plantation," broke new analytic ground in the study of the southern plantation system. Thompson refuted long-espoused climatic theories of the origins of plantation societies and offered instead a richly nuanced understanding of the links between plantation culture, the global history of capitalism, and the political and economic contexts of hierarchical social classification. This first complete publication of Thompson's study makes available to modern readers one of the earliest...

The New York Times praised Communist Party reporter John L. Spivak s shocking 1932 novel Georgia Nigger as having the weight and authority of a sociological investigation. This Southern Classics edition makes Spivak s narrative available to modern readers, augmented with a new introduction by David A. Davis as well as additional documents Spivak gathered during his investigation into the abuses of the Depression-era Southern prison system.
Georgia Nigger exposes the institutionalized system of sharecropping, debt peonage, and exorbitant chain gang sentences that trapped many southern...