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This book explores how Virginia was transformed from a British colony into a Southern slave state. It details how the traditional principles of land tenure were subverted by economic and political changes, and how they fostered law reforms where slavery replaced land ownership as the distinguishing basis for political power.

This book explores the relationship between freedom and slavery in the antebellum American South, studying authors who spoke for the Southwest's educated classes but often reached national readerships. Instead of treating freedom as an abstraction, this book analyzes the practical meanings attached to liberty by people who treasured it, even as they defended slavery.

This book describes Thomas Jefferson as the essential teller of what he once called the 'American Story' and argues that his confidence about America's greatness was rooted less in his famously cosmic optimism and more in his extensive empirical assessment of American character.

Examines perceptions of the natural world revealed by the religious ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina from the colonial period into the twentieth century. Focusing on Kongo nature spirits known as the simbi, Ras Michael Brown describes the essential role religion played in key historical processes.

New Orleans, the nineteenth-century South's only true metropolis, originally derived its prosperity as the chief export point for slave-produced commodities, most notably cotton. This book focuses on the city's merchants and how their conservative investment mentalities contributed to New Orleans' unusually rapid economic downfall during and after the Civil War.

This book examines the political economy of the master-slave relationship viewed through the lens of consumption and market exchange. What did it mean when human chattel bought commodities, 'stole' property, or gave and received gifts? Forgotten exchanges, this study argues, measured the deepest questions of worth and value, shaping an enduring struggle for power between slaves and masters.

This book sheds new light on the role of religion in the nineteenth-century slavery debates. Luke E. Harlow argues that the ongoing conflict over the meaning of Christian 'orthodoxy' constrained the political and cultural horizons available for defenders and opponents of American slavery.