This annotated edition offers an authoritative text of Herman Melville's classic short novel, accompanied by a generous selection of documents designed to give students a sense of the rich historical and cultural context of 19th-century America. The documents are thematically organized into categories including: sources/pretexts; Melville on race/violence; Catholicism, empire and the union; scientific racism; and the literature of slave rebellions in the 1850s. Materials include selections from Amasa Delano, William Cullen Bryant, Frederick Douglass, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Supreme Court arguments, a previously unpublished blackface skit, and Putnam's Magazine.