have all benefited from fresh insights and perspectives, new evidence,
and new techniques for exploiting this evidence.

Controversy has operated as both cause and effect of this forward
surge in the study of slavery. This is as it should be and as it must
necessarily be. Our understanding of slavery has gained enormously
from the cut and thrust of the historians' debates, but there is also a
danger that real historical situations and the real participants in them
may be obscured in the dust of the gladiatorial combat between one
historian and another. There is no good reason why a wider
readership should not have access to the riches amassed by the
distinguished historians of slavery during recent decades. History has
the enormous advantage that, unlike some of the social sciences, it
has not yet completely wrapped itself in a professional jargon which
serves to exclude those outside the inner circle. But how is a wider
audience to tune in to the multiplicity of voices which have spoken so
eloquently on the history of slavery? How is it to come to grips with
the intricacies of the debate and share its real excitement?

The purpose of this book is a modest one. It examines some of the
more important and illuminating recent work on slavery in the hope
of identifying crucial questions and basic themes, and defining some
of the main areas of controversy. Its aim--or at least its aspiration--is
to offer a few signposts, perhaps even a simple map, to guide those
coming afresh to this fascinating subject as they make their way
through the thickets of rival interpretations and the fog of historical
battle. At an early stage of the enterprise, I abandoned any pretense of
comprehensiveness and chose to concentrate on some of the most
conspicuous landmarks. The modern golden age of the historiography
of slavery, ushered in by Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins, came to
a climax with the publication of the major studies of John Blassin-
game, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Eugene Genovese, Her-
bert Gutman, and Lawrence Levine during the 1970s. One of my aims
in this book has been to measure the conclusions of these outstanding
landmarks in the study of slavery against the findings of recent and
more specialized studies dealing with particular aspects of the history
of slavery or with particular localities within the slaveholding South.
If the seventies were the decade of the grand synoptic overview of the
South's "peculiar institution," the eighties have been the decade of the
in-depth study. With one or two exceptions, the telescope has given
way to the microscope.

-x-