Plantations and Plain Folk

Louis Filler

A solid survey of slavery in the United States mostly absent of modern historical distortion.

Ulrich B. Phillips

Now out of favor, Phillips was in fact a great historian who did more research about American slavery than anyone ever has and who was a progressive for his time.

Raimondo Luraghi

A European scholar’s unique view of the nature and virtues of the antebellum South.

Eugene Genovese

A classic work on slavery that manages to avoid hysteria and be sympathetic to white and black Southerners both.

Elizabeth Fox Genovese and Eugene Genovese

The best balanced intellectual history on the antebellum white South.

Robert Fogel and Stanley Engernman

One of a number of books on the South that have been announced to have been disproved, though they haven’t really been.

Victoria Clayton

An account of life on an Alabama plantation both before and after the War by the wife of General Henry Delamar Clayton.

Archibald Rutledge

The life of a Low Country South Carolina plantation.

Walter Prescott Webb

Westward moving Southerners adapt to a new environment.

Frank Owsley

The definitive and never refuted description of the dominant agrarian middle class of the antebellum South.

Leon Litwack

Litwack exposes Northern hypocrisy during the antebellum period regarding race relations and the status of black Americans.

Anne Farrow, Joel Land, and Jennifer Frank

Farrow, Land, and Frank outline how the North profited from slavery and backed (financially, politically, and socially) its rise and success in America.

Larry Koger

Koger’s work offers a compelling story on the complexities of slavery in the South. It is mostly an untold tale.

John S. Lupold and Thomas L. French, Jr.

The unknown story of freedman Horace King, the man who built several bridges across the Chattahoochee and supplied the lumber for the Confederate ironclad, the C.S.S. Jackson.

Everett Dick

A solid cultural history about life on the Southern frontier.