Dal Lago (American history, National U. of Ireland-Galway) offers an interpretive summary of the past and present comparative history of American slavery and related scholarship, and suggests further directions of inquiry. He covers American slavery at the periphery of the Atlantic system; colonial slave societies between reforms and revolutions; the "cotton kingdom," its neighbors, and its contemporaries; servitude and agrarian labor in the Euro-American world; abolitionism and nationalism on the two sides of the Atlantic; and the American Civil War, slavery, and emancipation in a nation-building age. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)