For this special issue, we invited people who make portraying and analyzing American slavery their lives' work--from interpreters to historians and novelists--to probe the special challenges of their subject: the difficulties of seeing slavery, hearing slavery, filming slavery, and writing about slavery. The issue also introduces a new genre of reviews, "Re-readings," where some of today's leading scholars consider the ways that the great works of past decades still speak to them: Kathleen Brown reconsiders Edmund Morgan's classic, American Slavery, American Freedom, and Walter Johnson looks at Eugene Genovese's controversial Roll, Jordan, Roll. Regular Common-place columns in this issue track American slavery through the archives, on archaeological digs, into the classroom, and more.