Table of Contents:
  • The business of justice : merchants in the Charleston Chamber of Commerce and arbitration in the 1780s and 1790s / Sally E. Hadden
  • Strangers in the South : Charleston's merchants and middle-class values in the early republic / Jennifer L. Goloboy
  • Bonds of marriage and community : social networks and the development of a commercial middle class in antebellum South Carolina / Amanda Reece Mushal
  • Middle-class benevolent societies in antebellum Norfolk, Virginia / John G. Deal
  • Running Southern manufactories : the antebellum origins of managerial professions / Susanna Delfino
  • Three faces of the Southern middle class : the Aikin brothers in the Old Southwest / Angela Lakwete
  • Born of the aristocracy? : professionals with planter and middle-class origins in late antebellum South Carolina / Jennifer R. Green
  • Navigating "the muddy stream of party politics" : sectional politics and the Southern bourgeoisie / Frank Towers
  • The human and financial capital of the Southern middle class, 1850-1900 / Martin Ruef
  • Reconstructing the Southern middle class : professional and commercial Southerners after the Civil War / Jonathan Daniel Wells
  • Manufacturers and rural culture in the Reconstruction-era upcountry / Bruce W. Eelman
  • Of culture and conviction : African American women nonfiction writers and the gendered definitions of class / Sonya Ramsey
  • Epilogue : middle-class masters? / James Oakes.