 | Daytime and Starlight: Poems by James Applewhite
Buy used from: $1.20 Let's start with something beautiful. Applewhite is the best Southern poet of our times, an exemplar of "attachment to place", yet his books are largely out of print. I met him first in VS Naipaul's A TURN IN THE SOUTH, an insightful account of travel and talk.
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 | Chickamauga: Poems by Charles Wright
Buy new: $13.00 / Used from: $3.44 Charles Wright is the other superb poet of the South in our times, better known than Applewhite but still not widely read. Southerners often claim to have produced the best of American literature, but they have not always rewarded their writers with much attention.
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 | Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer
Buy new: $23.07 / Used from: $14.00 The Old South, the Middle Colonies, and New England have always been different in values and lifestyles. This book is long and cumbersome, but offers a very interesting explanation of the differences, based on cultures transmitted from Britain in colonial times.
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 | Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture) by Woody Holton
Buy new: $17.06 / Used from: $5.74 Way too much of the history of the Revolution has focused on Boston and Philadelphia. This studies looks at the reasons for rebellion in the most populous colony, Virginia.
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 | Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century by Thad W. Tate
Buy new: $13.95 / Used from: $4.80 |
 | The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia) by Rhys Isaac
Buy new: $17.96 / Used from: $4.50 |
 | Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation by Rhys Isaac
Buy new: $29.00 / Used from: $3.62 |
 | Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Native America: Yesterday and Today) by Robert J. Miller
Buy new: $49.95 / Used from: $37.00 The earliest racial confrontations of the Old South were between English colonists and Native Americans. The next three titles deal with the formative acts of ethnic cleansing in the Land of the Free.
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 | Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans by Anthony F. C. Wallace
Buy new: $31.50 / Used from: $3.98 |
 | The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)
Buy new: $14.17 / Used from: $5.00 |
 | Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1760-1860 by Christopher Morris
Buy new: $83.00 / Used from: $2.25 History is like HD TV, a question of pixels of information; the more pixels, the clearer the picture. This and the next four titles capture very tight images of Sothern society.
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 | Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History) by Steven Stowe
Buy new: $25.00 / Used from: $8.74 |
 | Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies) by Drew Gilpin Faust
Buy new: $19.95 / Used from: $9.46 Faust is the newly appointed President of Harvard, and a very fine Southern historian. All of her publications are top-notch.
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 | The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Library of Southern Civilization)
Buy new: $22.95 / Used from: $1.99 |
 | Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (Yale Historical Publications Series) by Barbara Jeanne Fields
Buy new: $22.00 / Used from: $3.40 |
 | An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 by Randolph B. Campbell
Buy new: $19.95 / Used from: $5.95 |
 | Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese
Buy new: $15.00 / Used from: $5.00 An older study, a classic in the field.
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 | The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation by Eugene D. Genovese
Buy new: $24.95 / Used from: $5.91 |
 | Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert William Fogel
Buy new: $12.21 / Used from: $4.89 Another classic in the field of historical methodology, maintaining basically that the Civil War was economically indefensible.
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 | Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement by Fergus M. Bordewich
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $1.82 This is an EPIC story, and an exciting book to read.
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 | Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress by William Lee Miller
Buy used from: $3.82 If you have ever doubted that slavery was the causative issue of sectional strife and of the Civil War, you have to read this book!
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 | The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery by Don E. Fehrenbacher
Buy new: $24.95 / Used from: $7.60 |
 | Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective (Galaxy Books) by Don E. Fehrenbacher
Buy new: $28.00 / Used from: $2.39 |
 | Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship `Amistad' by Mary Cable
Buy used from: $0.01 Much solider and more honest than the movie!
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 | John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights by David S. Reynolds
Buy new: $25.55 / Used from: $1.19 |
 | For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War by James M. McPherson
Buy new: $12.89 / Used from: $5.78 |
 | Conceived in Liberty: Joshua Chamberlin, William Oates, and the American Civil War by Mark Perry
Buy used from: $1.08 The closest I come to War history, a dual biography of two representative men, one Northern, one Southern.
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 | Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate by Eli Evans
Buy used from: $3.32 Before Karl Rove, there was Judah Benjamin, Jeff Davis's Brain.
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 | The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward
Buy new: $16.16 / Used from: $4.99 C. Vann Woodward is widely considered the "dean" of Southern History. This is a perennial classic.
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 | The Burden of Southern History by C. Vann Woodward
Buy new: $19.72 / Used from: $6.99 |
 | The Reconstruction Presidents by Brooks D. Simpson
Buy new: $35.00 / Used from: $9.00 A very fine recent study of Reconstruction. Simpson has also written an excellent book on the Presidency of US Grant.
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 | Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann
Buy new: $11.25 / Used from: $3.99 Another recent study, by a journalist rather than a historian, but substantial.
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 | Black Bourgeoisie: The Book That Brought the Shock of Self-Revelation to Middle-Class Blacks in America by E. Franklin Frazier
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $3.00 A classic by the "dean" of Afro-American Studies.
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 | The Mississippi Chinese : Between Black and White, Second Edition by James W. Loewen
Buy new: $19.50 / Used from: $3.50 Who? Where? Read it and learn!
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 | The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Tim Madigan
Buy new: $12.44 / Used from: $4.60 Graphic and distressing. The secret must not be kept!
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 | Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry
Buy new: $11.56 / Used from: $1.49 Before Hurricane Katrina, the same drama of inept leadership and ingrained racism played out in 1927.
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 | All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence by Fox Butterfield
Buy used from: $1.89 One son of the Old South became the most dangerous man in the prisons of New York. This is a bold essay in cultural determinism, powerful to read even if you can't accept the author's thesis.
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 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Passage of the Law That Ended Racial Segregation (Suny Series in Afro-American Studies)
Buy new: $26.95 / Used from: $9.21 The subtitle is of course prematurely optimistic. Recent events in Jena, Louisiana, and elsewhere have demonstrated that racial justice is still unfinished business.
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 | Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America by Jon Lewis
Buy new: $37.80 / Used from: $35.80 These photos constitute America's Holocaust Museum.
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 | The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South (and Why It Will Rise Again) by Clint Johnson
Buy new: $13.57 / Used from: $10.50 This is a deliberately misleading piece of work,replete with myths and the worst of Southern self-satisfaction and narrow-mindedness. Anyone who respects that "attachment to place" celebrated by Wendell Berry, Thomas Wolfe, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and other great Southern writers should cringe in indignation.
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