Robert F. Moss is a food writer and culinary historian living in Charleston, South Carolina. He is the contributing barbecue editor for Southern Living, the restaurant critic for the Charleston City Paper, and frequent contributor to publications like Serious Eats, Saveur, The Local Palate, Early American Life, and Garden & Gun.

• Preface to the Second EditionAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Barbecue in Colonial America2. “Republican Plenty”: Fourth of July and Campaign Barbecues3. The Barbecue Comes of Age4. Barbecue and the Civil War5. Barbecue, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow6. The Rise of Barbecue Restaurants7. Barbecue Finds the Backyard8. The First Golden Age of Barbecue9. The Decline of American Barbecue10. The Rebirth of American BarbecueAfterwordNotesReferencesIndex

“I thought the first edition of Barbecue: The History of an American Institution was the last word on the subject, but I was wrong. This revised edition is even better. The research that underlies every paragraph—almost every line—leaves me awed. This is a great history of barbecue, and actually a pretty good introduction to the history of America.”—John Shelton Reed, author of Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue“ Robert Moss cites murder and mayhem in 19th-century North Carolina barbecue stands. He tracks an early Tennessee pitmaster who earned a national reputation for ribs. And he follows Texas cotton pickers from the fields to the pits. Leveraging archival research, he documents and contextualizes a system of foodways too long shrouded in essentialist narratives and obscuring myths.” —John T Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South