Slavery and Emancipation

Slavery and Emancipation is a comprehensive collection of primary and secondary readings on the history of slaveholding in the American South combining recent historical research with period documents. The most comprehensive collection of primary and secondary readings on the history of slaveholding in America. Combines recent historical research with period documents to bring both immediacy and perspective to the origins, principles, realities, and aftermath of African-American slavery. Includes the colonial foundations of slavery, the master-slave relationship, the cultural world of the planters, the slave community, and slave resistance and rebellion. Each section contains one major article by a prominent historian, and three primary documents drawn from plantation records, travellers' accounts, slave narratives, autobiographies, statute law, diaries, letters, and investigative reports.

'Slavery and Emancipation is an uncommonly valuable teaching tool for students of American history. Halpern and Dal Lago have judiciously and creatively culled primary and secondary sources that cohere into an important interactive text. Their book traces the evolution of slavery as a virulent force in American life and the hard-fought triumph of emancipation.’ John David Smith, North Carolina State University ‘Slavery and Emancipation is a very welcome addition to the documentary record of this most important subject. An intelligent plan of organization, a shrewd selection of both primary and secondary readings, and a well-informed and judicious editorial commentary combine to make this volume an indispensable tool for teachers, students, and general readers alike.’ Bruce Levine, University of California, Santa Cruz

Rick Halpern is Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair of American Studies and a Professor of History at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses (1997), and co-editor of Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa (2000), and The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History (2002). Enrico Dal Lago is Lecturer in American History at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is the co-editor of The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History (2002), and author of the forthcoming Southern Elites: American Planters and Southern Italian Noblemen, 1815–1865.