Slavery and Emancipation is the most up-to-date and comprehensive collection of primary and secondary readings on the history of slaveholding in the American South. It combines recent historical research with period documents to bring both immediacy and perspective to the origins, principles, realities, and aftermath of African-American slavery. Central topics include the colonial foundations of slavery, the master-slave relationship, the cultural world of the planters, the slave community, and slave resistance and rebellion.Each topical section contains one major article by a prominent historian, and three primary documents. The documents have been drawn from a wide variety of sources, including plantation records, travellers' accounts, slave narratives, autobiographies, statute law, diaries, letters, and investigative reports. This material has been carefully chosen to benefit students and readers of the history of African-American slavery and emancipation.

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.