This comprehensive ready-reference encyclopedia of the history, people, events, places, movements, and issues of the Antebellum South is ideal for student use. Nearly 300 entries, selected for curriculum relevance with the assistance of historians and secondary school library media specialists, are organized alphabetically and thoroughly cross-referenced. The entries cover all aspects of political, economic, military, social, and cultural history of what was an exceedingly complex period fraught with contradictions. Slave life and conditions, plantation society, political and reform movements, revolts, industrialization, profiles with statistics of each Southern state, and biographical profiles of 90 key personalities of the period contribute to the comprehensive coverage of the encyclopedia. Each entry concludes with a bibliography of further reading suitable for students. A chronology of events and more than 45 illustrations from the period complement the text.

The work is dedicated to the history of the South and the southern lifestyle as it was in the half-century before the Civil War and looks at certain events a decade or so outside of this period to provide continuity. The authors have carefully selected entries that reveal the southern perceptions of society, culture, and politics. The South's peculiar institution of slavery and the extension of slavery into the territories are examined not only as uniquely individual elements of antebellum southern society but as themes which permeated the attitudes, beliefs, and actions of the antebellum southerner. The many entries on slave life and conditions provide the reader with a great deal of pertinent information about the institution of slavery and the lives of those enslaved. Easy to use and comprehensive, this is an ideal reference work for schools and public libraries.