This book examines the domestic lives and leisure pursuits of planters in the antebellum American South.

Eugene D. Genovese, one of the most significant and distinguished historians of his time, spent a lifetime studying the society of the Old South. His books include The Political Economy of Slavery 1967), The World the Slaveholders Made (1988), In Red and Black (1973), From Rebellion to Revolution (1992), The Slaveholders' Dilemma (1992), A Consuming Fire (2009), and Roll, Jordan, Roll (1976), which was awarded the Bancroft Prize. With his wife, the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, he wrote Fruits of Merchant Capital (1983), The Mind of the Master Class (Cambridge, 2005), Slavery in White and Black (Cambridge, 2008), and Fatal Self-Deception (Cambridge, 2012). A past president of the Organization of American Historians, Genovese died in 2012.

Introduction; 1. A gracious people; 2. Dining room, parlor, and lawn; 3. Horses and hounds; 4. Vignettes: sundry pleasures; 5. Vignettes: charms of high life; 6. Home away from home; 7. Matters not so sweet; Editor's epilogue.