The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective

by Fogel, Robert William

• ISBN13: 9780807128817
• ISBN10: 0807128813
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr

Summary

A Nobel Prize winner's personal account of one of the deepest conflicts among twentieth-century historians. In the 1950s, young scholars spurred by the burgeoning civil rights movement challenged the prevailing historical canon on American slavery, which held that slavery, while inefficient and unprofitable, was overall socially benign. The ensuing "slavery debates" encompassed a reexamination of almost every aspect of American slavery and became one front in a battle waged over the place of cliometrics--the use of quantitative data and statistical methods to analyze historical problems. Economist and historian Robert W. Fogel was at the forefront of the revisionists in the debates, and in this enlightening memoir he ponders the role cliometrics played in rethinking the economics of slavery and the South. Fogel chronicles the controversy surrounding his and colleague Stanley Engerman's 1974 groundbreaking book, Time on the Cross, one of the most fiercely debated works of U.S. history in the twentieth century. Using cliometrics, the authors revealed slavery to b

Author Biography

Robert William Fogel is director of the Center for Population Economics and Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction	1	(3)
LECTURE 1
Breaking Away From the Phillips Tradition	4	(20)
LECTURE 2
Coming to Terms with The Economic Viability of Slavery	24	(25)
LECTURE 3
Toward a New Synthesis on the Shaping of American Civilization	49	(24)
POSTSCRIPT
The Irony of the Early Debates About Black Studies	71	(2)
Selected Bibliography	73	(26)
Index	99