In the introductory chapter to this volume, Paul Barba weaves together some of the historical narratives that undergird the research in the chapters that follow and argues that cross-cutting histories of rebellion, insurgency, and revolution bound the diverse communities of the Gulf South together during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This introduction also contemplates the nuances and implications of the terminology of rebellion and lays out the analytical potential of juxtaposing and linking the histories of rebellion in the Gulf South. By following rebels, revolutionaries, militants, insurgents, opportunists, and subversives, this volume, Barba contends, recasts the Gulf South as a centripetal region in the history of early America, a place where worlds collided, overlapped, combined, and renewed themselves, where revolutionary fervor could thrive and percolate, mix, and coagulate. Bound together by violence, exploitation, greed, honor, family, community, and ideological commitment, Gulf South rebels drew from longer traditions of insurgency just as they forged new ones.