Bringing together original scholarly essays, The Old South's Modern Worlds deprovincializes the antebellum South, revealing a diverse region both shaped by and contributing to the complex modern developments that were transforming the nineteenth-century world. Students and specialists alike will find this collection extraordinarily helpful in placing the Old South within the modernizing world of the nineteenth century. Engaging, insightful and provocative, these essays will become a familiar landmark in the historiography of the South.