Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South, winner of the 1997 Avery O. Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians. His other books include Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, and two edited collections, The Old South and Hearing History: A Reader.