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Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian of American class, race, and inequality, with a particular focus on the South during and after the Civil War. Her book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South deftly navigates discourses on race, power, and capitalism, telling us what happens to \u201cexcess labor\u201d under a slave economy. In this conversation, she talks about the South\u2019s influence on her direction as a scholar, and explains how vital elements of the Southern political economy (from \u201cright to work\u201d to convict leasing) have spread to the rest of the country.