• Analyze the complex relations among the different elements of southern society: planter-aristocrats, small planters, poor whites, slaves, and free blacks. Contrast the dominant slaveholding elite with the mass of poorer whites who nevertheless supported slavery.
  
  REFERENCES: Bruce Collins, White Society in the Antebellum South (1985); Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters (1975).
  
  

• Examine the nature of slavery. Explain how slavery was both an economic institution and a social system that shaped whites and blacks alike, including their social and family life.
  
  REFERENCE: Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1996).
  
  

• Describe the lives of blacks under slavery. Show both the burdens of the system and the slaves' struggles to survive and maintain their humanity.
  
  REFERENCE: Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (1976).
  
  

• Explain the various responses to slavery, from radical abolitionism to the defense of slavery as a positive good, and why the abolitionists had such a great impact even though they were an unpopular minority.
  
  REFERENCE: Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, Antislavery Reconsidered (1979).