There are quite a few fascinating primary source documents in this text. However, they are not enough to make up for some of the more dry, uninteresting documents and essays that appear over and over again. As a graduating historian, I appreciate documents and essays by other historians, but the editors of this book seem to have neglected to include some of the more famous and educational reads coming out of the south before the Civil War. Once the book happens upon slavery and the run-up to the war itself, it becomes much more interesting, but until then, it seems that they were quite content with taking whatever bits of dry content they could find and piecing them together haphazardly to form the first half of the text. Like I said, there are some real gems within this book, but one must look very closely for them, and put up with a lot of fluff and bother in the meantime. ( )