At Buffalo Forge, an extensive ironmaking and farming enterprise in Virginia before the Civil War, a unique treasury of materials yields an "engrossing, often surprising record of everyday life on an estate in the antebellum South" (Kirkus Reviews).

In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America's most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation.

Dew re-creates the midcentury American South of his childhood--in many respects a boy's paradise, but one stained by Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow. Through entertainments and -educational- books that belittled African Americans, as well as the living examples of his own family, Dew...

Charles Dew's Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states' secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of America's great national crisis.

Charles Dew's Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states' secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of America's great national crisis.

In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America's most respected historians of the South - and particularly its history of slavery - turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation.