Includes bibliographical references and index.

Antebellum southerners and the national idea / Peter S. Onuf -- A world safe for modernity: Antebellum southern proslavery intellectuals confront Great Britain / Matthew Mason -- The burdens and opportunities of interdependence: the political economies of the planter class / Brian Schoen -- "A disposition to work": rural enslaved laborers on the eve of the Civil War / Larry E. Hudson, Jr. -- Rethinking the slave trade: slave traders and the market revolution in the south / Steven Deyle -- The pregnant economies of the border south, 1840-1860: Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the possibilities of slave-labor expansion / James L. Huston -- The southern path to modern cities: urbanization in the slave states / Frank Towers -- "Swerve me?": The south, railroads, and the rush to modernity / William G. Thomas -- Industry and its laborers, free and slave in late-Antebellum Virginia / L. Diane Barnes -- Zion in black and white: African-American Evangelicals and missionary work in the old south / Charles F. Irons -- The return of the native: innovative traditions in the southeast / Andrew K. Frank -- Sex, self, and the performance of patriarchal manhood in the old south / Craig Thompson Friend -- Counterpoint: what if Genovese is right?: The premodern outlook of southern Planters / Marc Egnal -- The American Civil War, emancipation, and reconstruction on the world stage / Edward L. Ayers.