Published in 1844, this description of the American South documents its fascinating geography and its often harsh and violent society.

Documenting multiple aspects of slavery and its development in North America, this collection provides more than one hundred excerpts from personal accounts, songs, legal documents, diaries, letters, and other written sources. The book assembles a remarkable portrayal of the day-to-day connections between, and among, slaves and their owners across more than two centuries of subjugation and resistance, despair and hope. Beginning with a chronicle of the origins of slavery in the British colonies of North America, the collection traces the growth of the system to the antebellum period and includes accounts of slave revolts, auctions, slave travel and laws, and family life. Intimate as well as comprehensive, the documents reveal the individual views, goals, and lives of slaves and their masters, making this engaging work one of the most respected catalogs of firsthand information about slavery in North America.

This third edition of Stanley M. Elkin's classic study offers two new chapters by the author. The first, "Slavery and Ideology," considers the discussion and criticism occasioned by this controversial work. Elkins amplifies his original purpose in writing the book and takes into consideration the substantial body of critical commentary. He also attempts a prediction on the course of future research and discussion.

Historians have considered slavery and Mississippi together in academic studies, assuming that the two were, and always had been, inextricable linked. Libby attempts to answer the hows and whys of slavery's development during the period when Mississippi was a frontier region. His findings suggest that slavery took many shapes in Mississippi before it became the institution stereotyped in so much scholarship studying the later antebellum period. -- adapted from Introduction.