Computer technology has yet to redefine how historians conceive the past. This article shows that a computer database is a better metaphor for antebellum legal activity than the leading cases scholars usually present to their students. A database can present a picture of an island community's determinedly local peculiarities better than data structured by a researcher's assumption that, within a national or even world context, one neighborhood is much the same as another. In the future, computers will allow scholars to disaggregate the past for their students, making comprehensible the decentralized reality of traditional society. Keywords: education, federalism, computers, databases, Mississippi.
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