Winner of the J. B. Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers Originally published in 1998. "The plantation," writes Charles Aiken, "is among the most misunderstood institutions of American history. The demise of the plantation has been pronounced many times, but the large industrial farms survive as significant parts of, not just the South's, but the nation's agriculture."In this sweeping historical and geographical account, Aiken traces the development of the Southern cotton plantation since the Civil War—from the emergence of tenancy after 1865, through its decline during the Depression, to the post-World War Two development of the large industrial farm. Tracing the geographical changes in plantation agriculture and the plantation regions after 1865, Aiken shows how the altered landscape of the South has led many to the false conclusion that the plantation has vanished. In fact, he explains, while certain regions of the South have reverted to other uses, the cotton plantation survives in a form that is, in many ways, remarkably similar to that of its antebellum predecessors. Aiken also describes the evolving relationship of African-Americans to the cotton plantation during the thirteen decades of economic, social, and political changes from Reconstruction through the War on Poverty—including the impact of alterations in plantation agriculture and the mass migration of Southern blacks to the urban North during the twentieth century. Richly illustrated with more than 130 maps and photographs (many original and many from FSA photographers), The Cotton Plantation South is a vivid and colorful account of landscape, geography, race, politics, and civil rights as they relate to one of America's most enduring and familiar institutions.

This volume represented a compilation of interdisciplinary research being done throughout the American South and the Caribbean by historians, archaeologists, architects, anthropologists, and other scholars on the topic of slavery and plantations. It synthesizes materials known through the 1980s and reports on key sites of excavation and survey in the Carolinas, Barbados, Louisiana and other locations. Contributors include many of the leading figures in historical archaeology.

The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. With A Man in Full, the time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist. A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

The basis of this discipline must consist in accustoming your negroes to an absolute submission to orders; for if you suffer them to disobey in one instance, they will do so in another; and thus an independence of spirit will be acquired, that will demand repeated punishment to suppress it, and to re-establish your relaxed authority. You should, therefore, lay it down as a rule, never to suffer your commands to be disputed; and, at the same time, you should take care to give none but what are reasonable and proper; for negroes are penetrating enough into the foibles of their masters. If you have any, you should conceal them with a good opinion of your temper and judgment. -from I: "Plantation Management" American historian ULRICH BONNELL PHILLIPS (1877-1934) made a career of studying slavery and the economics of the American South through the 19th century, and he was often criticized by his successors for his emphasis on painting slave masters and plantation owners in a positive light. But even Phillips' detractors acknowledge the valuable work he did in bringing to light the priceless original source material from which we can better understand the period. In this two-volume work, first published in 1909, Phillips creates a portrait of the economic life of the South drawn from the details and minutiae found in legal contracts, personal letters and diaries, newspaper articles and editorials, advertisements, plantation records, court records, warrants and affidavits, public notices, city ordinances, and other hard-to-find documents. From the everyday realities of the usage of slave labor to the working conditions of poor whites to the daily routines and management of plantations, what emerges is a unique, on-the-ground perspective of the slaveholding era. Excepts from the table of contents of Volume I: "Records of a rice plantation" "Management of scattered plantations; Georgia 1844-1849" "Diary of work on a sea-island cotton plantation" "Upland cotton methods" "Uncertainty of returns in tobacco" "Loses by disease and accidents among the slaves" "Bad seasons and slave runaways" "An overseer's testimonial" "The routine problems and policies of an efficient overseer" "Classes and conditions of white servants" "Indented labor useless on a disturbed frontier" "Convict transportation, vicissitudes"