It has been more than three decades since the National Science Foundation provided the funding for two young professors at the University of California, Berkeley, to establish the Southern Economic History Project. We could hardly have guessed in 1968 that our project, which culminated in the publication of One Kind of Freedom in 1977, would have such a long-lasting impact on the way scholars viewed the postbellum American South. The prospect of reexamining our youthful contributions as we write a preface for this new edition of the book is both humbling and exciting. Have quarter-of-a-century-old ideas and logic withstood the scrutiny of new evidence, new methods, new questions, and new sensibilities? There are, after all, many reasons to think they might not.

First, consider the new research. As we wrote in the preface to the first edition of this book, “economists … had virtually ignored black history in the post-Civil War period” (p. xiii). This paucity of work thirty years ago stands in sharp contrast to the voluminous bibliography that exists today. Indeed, scholarly writings on the history of American slavery, the impact of emancipation, and the problems of the southern economy after the Civil War that we dealt with in this book have become so voluminous that we admit to have not thoroughly examined all of it ourselves. With the assistance of our research assistant Edward Essau, we compiled a Bibliography of work on the post-emancipation period that has appeared since One Kind of Freedom was published.