From the cotton boll to the Cotton Bowl in modern American cultureThere are few places on earth as thoroughly identified with a crop as the American South is with cotton. Burgundy is known for wine, and Java has coffee. In the South, for most of its history, cotton was king. Through much of the twentieth century, cotton cultivation determined nearly every aspect of life in the region. In Bale After Bale, leading historians and cultural critics offer multif...

In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln promised that the nation’s sacrifices during the Civil War would lead to a “new birth of freedom.” Lincoln’s Unfinished Work analyzes how the United States has attempted to realize—or subvert—that promise over the past century and a half. The volume is not solely about Lincoln, or the immediate unfinished work of Reconstruction, or the broader unfinished work of America coming to terms with its tangled history of race; it investigates all...