Though few have been written, local histories of slaveholding plantations and of slavery on the town and county levels are important for a real understanding of the social history of the Old South and the slave regime. The editors bring together twenty-one of the best in-depth studies of slavery in microcosm, ranging from U.B. Phillips's classic 1907 study of the Charleston District to Theodore Hershberg's important new work on free blacks in antebellum Philadelphia. They provide a needed view of the heterogeneous nature of American slave society. The essays provide a geographical balance between upper, middle, and lower South. They cover slave economy and its social setting ; differences between farm and plantation life ; the specifics of slave hiring, control, and resistance ; the origins and growth of the great plantations of the Southeast ; the character of the "Big House" and the treatment of slaves ; and conditions of blacks in two northern cities as well as in the South. -- Back cover.