Word: historians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...portent, the fallen oak may not be in the same league as the events that the Historian Livy claimed presaged disaster in ancient Rome: swamps turned the color of blood, chalk rained from the skies, a spear on a statue moved of its own accord, an ox talked and a child in the womb cried "Hurrah!" Still, several Michigan newspapers carried a photo of the splintered tree with the caption "Warning from Above...
Simon Legrees existed, the authors are quick to admit. But, the book suggests, the moonlight and molasses nostalgia of a Stephen Foster may somewhat more accurately describe the average relationship between slave and master than any serious historian has been willing to admit for years. The authors blend statistics on everything from the percentage of blacks in skilled plantation trades to the average age of black mothers at the time of their first-born child. The result is a vision of plantations as businesses administered in ways that suggest both a Victorian family and a paternalistic corporation eager to encourage...
Such views, especially regarding economics and slave inefficiency, lasted into the 20th century, when they were adapted by Historian U.B. Phillips, a Southern racist whose aim was to rehabilitate the cruel plantation owners. Though he successfully showed that many slaves were well fed and cared for, he accepted the notion that plantations were not run for a profit. Instead, he argued, plantations, "were the best schools yet invented for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people...
Dumbfoundingly, Phillips' American Negro Slavery, published in 1918, remained a dominant force in slave historiography for 30 years. Despite WPA interviews with former slaves in the 1930s and the work of a number of black historians, which went largely ignored, it was not until the period between Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma in 1944 and Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956) that emphasis began to be placed on environment and the effects that slavery had on blacks and black culture. The stereotype of childlike, lackadaisical behavior of plantation blacks remained, though it now began...
...thought that the statistics were sometimes sparse, that they should and would be subjected to extreme scrutiny. Many pointed out the limitations of economics in re-creating the past. Historian Harold Woodman noted, for in stance, that the book's use of per capita income as an 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...