These essays introduce the complexities of researching and analyzing "race". This book focuses on problems confronted while researching, writing and interpreting race and slavery, such as conflict between ideological perspectives, and changing interpretations of the questions.

John David Smith is Graduate Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at North Carolina State University. In 1998-1999, he served as Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Amerika-Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. Dr. Smith is the author or editor of eleven books, including An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918 (1985, 1991), Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (1988, 1997, with Randall M. Miller), Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: A Southern Historian and His Critics (1990, 1993, with John C. Inscoe), Black Voices from Reconstruction (1996, 1997), and an edition of W.E.B. Du Bois's John Brown (M.E. Sharpe, 1997). Professor Smith received the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America for his eleven-volume documentary, Anti-Black Thought, 1863-1925: "The Negro Problem" (1993).

Part 1 Conflicts; Chapter 1 George H. Moore; Chapter 2 James Ford Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, and the Passing of the Amateur Historian of Slavery; Chapter 3 W.E.B. Du Bois and Ulrich Bonnell Phillips; Chapter 4 Historical or Personal Criticism?; Chapter 5 The Historiographic Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips; Part 2 Trends; Chapter 6 Alfred Holt Stone; Chapter 7 Neglected but Not Forgotten; Chapter 8 A Different View of Slavery; Chapter 9 The Unveiling of Slave Folk Culture, 1865-1920; Chapter 10 E. Merton Coulter, the "Dunning School," and The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky; Chapter 11 Ulrich Bonneil Phillips's World Tour and the Study of Comparative Plantation Societies; Chapter 12 A Southern Historian on Tour; Part 3 Method; Chapter 13 "Keep 'Em in a Fire-Proof Vault"; Chapter 14 The Historian as Archival Advocate; Chapter 15 Ulrich Bonnell Phillips's Plantation and Frontier Documents: 1649-1863;