Slavery : A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), based on Elkin's doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, was theoretically innovative and enormously influential in the years after its publication, although its arguments are largely rejected today.
From the Preface to the third edition:
The original edition of this work has not been altered here, in that its text remains as it was when it was first published in 1959. But two new parts have been added to the original four, thus extending the text by some forty percent, in recognition that the subject itself has grown immensely during the intervening years. A word or two on these additions may be called for. By the late 1960’s a substantial body of critical commentary on my book had accumulated, and Professor Ann J. Lane undertook at that time to assemble some leading examples of it in a collection to which she invited me to contribute. I did so, and the resulting volume, under her editorship, was published in 1971 as The Debate over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and his Critics by the University of Illinois Press. The essay I prepared for that occasion, “Slavery and Ideology,” reappears as Part V of the present edition.
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