Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (Oxford University Press, 1984; paperback edition, 1986)
The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia, edited with John C. Willis (University Press of Virginia, 1991)
The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 1992; paperback edition, 1993; abridged edition, 1995; 15th Anniversary Edition, 2007)
All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions, co-editor and co-author, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
The Oxford Book of the American South: Testimony, Memory, and Fiction, edited with Bradley Mittendorf (Oxford University Press, 1997)
The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War – The Eve of War, CD-ROM and book, co-authored with Anne S. Rubin (W. W. Norton and Company, 2000)
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863, (W.W. Norton, 2003)
What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History, (W.W. Norton, 2005)
The Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration, edited with Gary Gallagher and Andrew Torget (University of Virginia Press, 2006)
America on the Eve of the Civil War, edited with Carolyn R. Martin (University of Virginia Press, 2010)
America’s War: Talking about the Civil War and Emancipation on Their 150th Anniversaries, edited for the National Endowment for the Humanities and American Library Association
The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (W.W. Norton, 2017)
Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020 (LSU Press, 2020)
