"Mutti Burke paints an intimate portrait of slavehocholding in a state where slaveholders of small means predominated. Showingwhat this meant for how slaves, slaveholders, and nonslaveholders related to each other, socialized, built communities, and constituted family and kin networks, this book expands and fundamentally alters the historiographical landscape."---THAVOLIA GLYMPH, author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household<BR><BR>"On Slavery's Border tackles two important and understudied subjects: the history of slavery in the South's border states and the nature of small-scale slavery. It is full of original, interesting, and useful insight about many topics---from the forced and voluntary migrations that created Missouri's patterns of slavery, to white gender ideologies that resembled those of the midwestern farming communities to the north and east, to the labor, leisure, and familial interactions that shaped the material and affective worlds of whites and African Americans."---LESLIE A. SCHWALM, author of Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest<BR><BR>"Highly original and beautifully crafted, On Slavery's Border intervenes meaningfully and helpfully into some of the most important scholarly conversations about southern slavery. Mutti Burke tackles a region of the antebellum South rarely examined, and the dividends are rich."MARK M. SMITH, author of How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses<BR><BR>On Slavery's Border is a bottom-up examination of how slavery and slaveholding were influenced by both the geography and the scale of the slaveholding enterprise. Missouri's strategic access to important waterways made it a key site at the periphery of the Atlantic world. By the time of statehood in 1821, people were moving there in large numbers, especially from the upper South, hoping to replicate the slave society they'd left behind.<BR><BR>Diane Mutti Burke focuses on the Missouri counties located along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to investigate small-scale slavery at the level of the household and neighborhood. She examines such topics as small slaveholders' child-rearing and fiscal strategies, the economics of slavery, relations between slaves and owners, the challenges faced by slave families, sociability among enslaved and free Missourians within rural neighborhoods, and the disintegration of slavery during the Civil War.