This definitive, 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 nineteenth-century America. The documents are thematically organised 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Delano, William Cullen Bryant, Frederick Douglass, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Supreme Court arguments, a previously unpublished blackface skit, and Putnam's Magazine.