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

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...

Ralph McGill (1898-1969) was the editor in chief of the Atlanta Constitution during the turbulent years of the civil rights movement that followed Brown v. Board of Education, and he became an outspoken advocate for integration and racial tolerance in the South. In this Southern Classics edition, Angie Maxwell offers a new critical introduction that analyzes McGill's as an activist and advocate for social change.The editorials that compose A Church, a School marked McGill's emergence as a prolific advocate of nonviolence and social responsibility and evidenced the progressive values of the...

A stirring firsthand account of lowcountry race relations during a turbulent period in civil rights history In 1966, as a seminarian at the Virginia Theological Seminary, William H. Barnwell undertook a summer's missionary work at St. John's Episcopal Mission Center in his native city of Charleston, South Carolina. His supervisor was an African American priest, and Barnwell's duties ran the gamut from managing the recreation room to crisis intervention among the mission's clients and neighbors. In Richard's World is based on letters and journal entries that Barnwell kept throughout 1966, a...

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...

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...

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...

James De Veaux (1812-1844) was a promising young South Carolina-born artist who began his career painting portraits up and down the East Coast and throughout his native state. First published by Robert W. Gibbes in 1846, A Memoir of James De Veaux, of Charleston, S.C. is a biography and selected edition of the artist's letters and diary entries. It is also the first work published in South Carolina devoted solely to the state's visual arts. Although De Veaux's life and career were tragically brief, he produced a considerable body of work, mostly portraits, and availed himself of the best...

Slavery in Mississippi, first published in 1933, is a deeply researched and tightly argued social and economic study of slave life in Mississippi by Charles S. Sydnor (1898-1954). Inspired by Ulrich B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), Sydnor strived to test Phillips's contention that slavery was simultaneously a benign institution for African American slaves and an unprofitable one for their masters. Sydnor included pathbreaking chapters on such broad scholarly topics as slave labor, slave trading, and the profitability of slavery, but he...

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