A celebrated social history, ""Life and Labor in the Old South"" (1929) represents the culmination of three decades of research and reflection on the social and economic systems of the antebellum South by a leading historian of the first half of the twentieth century. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877-1934) sought to include populations neglected in earlier scholarship as a means of underscoring the region's complex diversity and the importance of human interaction. Deeply researched in primary sources, carefully focused on social and economic facets of slavery, and gracefully written, Phillips' germinal account set the standard for his contemporaries. Simultaneously the work is rife with elitism, racism, and reliance on sources that privilege white perspectives. Such contradictions between its content and viewpoint have earned this study its place at the forefront of texts in the historiography of the antebellum South and African American slavery. This edition includes a new introduction by John David Smith that frames the volume within Progressive Era scholarship, chronicles its critical reception, and highlights its influence on contemporary historical debates.

First published in 1939, McGillivray of the Creeks is a unique mix of primary and secondary sources for the study of American Indian history in the Southeast. The historian John Walton Caughey's brief but definitive biography of Creek leader Alexander McGillivray (1750-1793) is coupled with 214 letters between McGillivray and Spanish and American political officials. The volume offers distinctive firsthand insights into Creek and Euroamerican diplomacy in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi in the aftermath of the American Revolution as well as a glimpse into how historians have viewed the controversial Creek leader. McGillivray, the son of a famous Scottish Indian trader and a Muskogee Creek woman, was educated in Charleston, South Carolina, and, with his father's guidance, took up the mantle of negotiator for the Creek people during and after the Revolution. While much of eighteenth-century American Indian history relies on accounts written by non-Indians, the letters reprinted in this volume provide a valuable Indian perspective into Creek diplomatic negotiations with the Americans and the Spanish in the American South. Crafty and literate, McGillivray's letters reveal his willingness to play American and Spanish interests against one another. Whether he was motivated solely by a devotion to his native people or by the advancement of his own ambitions is the subject of much historical debate.

A memoir of the ambitious life and controversial political career of Louisiana governor Henry Clay Warmoth (1842-1931), ""War, Politics, and Reconstruction"" is a firsthand account of the political and social machinations of Civil War America and the war's aftermath in one of the most volatile states of the defeated Confederacy. An Illinois native, Warmoth arrived in Louisiana in 1864 as part of the federal occupation forces. Upon leaving military service in 1865, he established a legal practice in New Orleans. Taking full advantage of the chaotic times, Warmoth rapidly amassed fortune and influence, and soon emerged as a leader of the state's Republican Party and, in 1868, was elected governor. Amid an administration rife with scandal, the Louisiana Republican Party broke into warring factions. Warmoth survived an impeachment attempt in 1872, but a second attempt in 1873 culminated with his removal from office. This fall from Republican grace stemmed from his allegiance with white conservatives, remnants of the old guard, and staunch opponents of those Republicans who sought a wider political role for African Americans. Never again to hold political office, Warmoth remained in his adopted Louisiana, enjoying the fruits of his investments in plantations and sugar refineries. In 1930, the year before his death, he published ""War, Politics, and Reconstruction"", a vindication of his public life and a rebuttal of his carpetbagger reputation. Despite Warmoth's obvious self-serving biases, the volume offers unparalleled personal insights into the inner workings of Reconstruction government in Louisiana in the words of one of its key architects. A new introduction by John C. Rodrigue places Warmoth's memoir within the broader context of evolving perceptions and historiography of Reconstruction. Rodrigue also offers readers a more balanced portrait of Warmoth by providing supplemental information omitted or slighted by the author in his efforts to cast his actions in the most positive light.

The reissue of The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston makes available for a new generation of readers a firsthand look at one of South Carolina's most influential antebellum dynasties and the institutions of slavery and plantation agriculture upon which it was built. Often cited by historians, Robert F. W. Allston's letters, speeches, receipts, and ledger entries chronicle both the heyday of the rice industry and its precipitate crash during the Civil War. As Daniel C. Littlefield underscores in his introduction to the new edition, these papers are significant not only because of Allston's position at the apex of planter society but also because his views represented those of the rice planter elite. Allston (1801-1864) owned or managed seven plantations along the Pee Dee and Waccamaw rivers, including Chicora Wood, Rose Bank, and Brookgreen, now known as Brookgreen Gardens. A Jeffersonian republican, he served in the South Carolina General Assembly from 1832 until he was elected governor in 1856. After his death in 1864, his daughter Elizabeth Allston Pringle continued the family's rice-growing activities and achieved personal renown as a columnist for the New York Times and author of A Woman Rice Planter. The collection includes letters between Allston and his wife and children, correspondence with politicians, fiscal documents from the operation of his plantations, records related to the sale and care of slaves, and political speeches.

An early assessment of the contest between an economically defunct and politically aggressive Southern slave power and a liberal, free-wage-labor North The Slave Power, John E. Cairnes's seminal work on slavery, was widely acclaimed upon publication in 1862 as a brilliant attempt both to explain the essential cause of the American Civil War and to shape European policy concerning the struggle. It remains among the most important works on the political economy of Southern slavery. When Cairnes--one of the nineteenth century's preeminent classical liberal economists--characterized Southern slavery as inefficient and backward, his opinions carried enormous weight, earning him applause in the North and castigation in the slave- holding South. Casting the Civil War as a contest between an economically defunct and politically aggressive Southern slave power and a liberal, capitalist, free-wage-labor North, Cairnes offered an interpretation of the origins of the Civil War that has remained as compelling and controversial as it was when first published. Mark M. Smith's new introduction to the work places The Slave Power in historical context by explaining the intellectual milieu in which the book was written (including a treatment of classical liberal economic thought in Great Britain), the book's friendly reception in Union circles, and its rejection by war-torn Confederates. Smith also traces the book's reception by successive generations of historians of the slave South.