Contents

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Introduction: Reimagining the Old South

L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, Frank Towers

Part I: The South in a World of Nations

1. Antebellum Southerners and the National Idea

Peter S. Onuf

2. A World Safe for Modernity: Antebellum Southern Proslavery Intellectuals Confront Great Britain

Matthew Mason

3. The Burdens and Opportunities of Interdependence: The Political Economies of the Planter Class

Brian Schoen

Part II: Slavery in a Modernizing Society

4. “A Disposition to Work”: Rural Enslaved Laborers on the Eve of the Civil War

Larry E. Hudson, Jr.

5. Rethinking the Slave Trade: Slave Traders and the Market Revolution in the South

Steven Deyle

6. The Pregnant Economies of the Border South, 1840–1860: Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Possibilities of Slave-Labor Expansion

James L. Huston

Part III : Material Progress and Its Discontents

7. The Southern Path to Modern Cities: Urbanization in the Slave States

Frank Towers

8. “Swerve Me?”: The South, Railroads, and the Rush to Modernity

William G. Thomas

9. Industry and Its Laborers, Free and Slave in Late-Antebellum Virginia

L. Diane Barnes

Part IV : The Blurred Boundaries of Southern Culture

10. Zion in Black and White: African-American Evangelicals and Missionary Work in the Old South

Charles F. Irons

11. The Return of the Native: Innovative Traditions in the Southeast

Andrew K. Frank

12. Sex, Self, and the Performance of Patriarchal Manhood in the Old South

Craig Thompson Friend

Part V : The Long View of the Old South

13. Counterpoint: What If Genovese Is Right?: The Premodern Outlook of Southern Planters

Marc Egnal

14. The American Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction on the World Stage

Edward L. Ayers

Afterword

Michael O’Brien

Conclusion: The Future of the Old South

L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, Frank Towers

Index