After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South. Edited by Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly. New Perspectives on the History of the South. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2013. Pp. [x], 266. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-6097-2; cloth, $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-4477-4.) Some essay collections contain useful pieces whose value equals but does not exceed the sum of the parts; others contain essays that speak to each other and create a whole that does exceed the sum of its parts. After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South comes closest to the second type. Some of the essays resonate in ways that give them more meaning by appearing together than they would apart, but others sit uneasily at a distance. Overall, the collection highlights labor, the urban South, violence, and the role of the central state as dominant but not easily integrated themes in current historiography. It also reveals that the field is still searching for ways to reconcile the specificity of place in the experience of Reconstruction with the reality of emancipation as a transnational phenomenon. In both strengths and struggles, After Slavery provides a vivid snapshot of the current state of the Reconstruction field. After Slavery grew out of two conferences, and the book reads a lot like an enjoyably rigorous conference panel. In the introduction, two of the conference organizers, Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly, capably survey Reconstruction's present historiographical landscape and introduce the contributors, much like chairs opening panel sessions. In the afterword, Eric Foner as wise commentator scans the field from the vantage point of one who shaped it, locates the essays within it, and facilitates questions and answers between essays and audience. Another similarity between the book and a conference (in which presenters title papers before writing them) is that sometimes essay titles bear little resemblance to content, so determining what an essay is about requires reading the whole essay, not just the title. The research involved in all the contributions is sound, drawing on the records of the Freedmen's Bureau, newspapers, congressional testimony, and the like; and in some cases, such as Susan Eva O'Donovan's analysis of Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company records, it is innovative. From these sources, key themes emerge. One is labor, sometimes in the rural context that defined the lives of most emancipated black southerners, such as in Jonathan M. Bryant's treatment of the Georgia Lowcountry and Erik Mathisen's examination of rural Mississippi. James Illingworth's look at New Orleans labor violence juxtaposes the trusty theme of labor with a theme coming to prominence lately: consideration of the urban South. O'Donovan's investigation of Wilmington, North Carolina, also contributes to the urban theme directly, while J. Michael Rhyne's essay on Kentucky contributes indirectly with a brief discussion of why black Kentuckians preferred cities. …