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Peter Kolchin, author of numerous articles and two books on United Stares slavery and emancipation, including the Bancroft Prize-winning Unfree Labor (1987), has attempted a most ambitious task, a "short interpretive survey of American slavery" that will be both "substantive and historiographical." This is, of course, not the only recent work on slavery intending to provide such a survey draws from secondary sources. Among other works aiming to do so, with varying mixes of substantive analysis and historiographic detail, are John B. Boles, Black Southerners: 1619-1869 (1983); Peter J. Parish, Slavery: History and Historians (1989); and Donald R. Wright, African Americans in the Colonial Era (1990) and African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789-1831 (1993), each doing for the United States what Herbert S. Klein has accomplished for the rest of the Americas in...