Forty years after its original publication by the Duke University Press, Orville W. Taylor's Negro Slavery in Arkansas still stands as the only comprehensive treatment of the "peculiar institution" in the state. Long out of print and found only in rare-book stores, it is now available to a contemporary audience with this new paperback edition. Orville Taylor traces the growth of slavery from John Law's colony in the early eighteenth century through the French and Spanish colonial period, territorial and statehood days to the beginning of the Civil War. He describes the various facets of the institution including the slave trade, work and overseers, health and medical treatment, food, clothing, housing, marriage, personal morality, legal regulation and discipline, and the free black and manumission.