Word: engerman
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Dates: during 1974-1974
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...ROBERT WILLIAM FOGEL and STANLEY L. ENGERMAN...
...table. The French historian's graceful bow to the supremacy of broad and easily retrievable research over insight has now been carried to devastating extremes by the authors of this provocative book. Fogel, 47, is a professor of economics and history at the universities of Chicago and Rochester. Engerman, 38, is professor of economics and history at Rochester. Together they are the leading edge of a new wing of historians known as cliometricians because their methods marry Clio, the muse of history, to the practice of quantifying the past with the help of computers. They are armed with...
Among the most widely accepted and notable errors, the authors suggest, was the belief that slavery was economically dying in 1860, that slave labor was inefficient and slovenly, and-most important-that slavery produced hideously hard conditions of life for the average slave. Not so, say Fogel and Engerman, offering statistics on per capita income and return on capital to prove it. Slavery was booming in 1860, and plantations were 40% more efficient than Northern agriculture...
...index of economic growth is questionable when applied to a nonindustrial society. Economic Historian Murray Rothbard said, "Cliometrics doesn't work for the current economy, so how could it work on information from 1860?" Sociologist Orlando Patter son questioned some of the inferences that Fogel and Engerman draw from their statistics, such as the assumption that young black girls were prudish, not promiscuous, because the average age of black slave women on having a first child...
Fogel and Engerman blame it on the racism of most Americans, an often unconscious racism that makes them take black people's weakness for granted and restrict themselves to trying to explain it as an inborn quality or, for the more liberal, as a consequence of oppression. In their epilogue, Fogel and Engerman say they wrote Time on the Cross to attack this view and to show that even under slavery, black people were among the most accomplished and admirable people in the United States, "to strike down the view that black Americans were without culture, without achievement, and without...