Word: engerman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There is a withering crossfire of pedantries in nearly all academic discussions of slavery and American blacks. Two years ago, in a book called Time on the Cross, Economist-Historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman accumulated a mass of data on antebellum life in the South. They fed their statistics into computers and came up with an astonishing portrait of slavery as a highly rational and efficient system that gave the South considerable economic growth and a high standard of living for all Southerners, both black and white. While admitting the immorality of slavery, Fogel and Engerman found that blacks...
...Fogel and Engerman thesis, rather weirdly cheerful, seemed a relapse back to something like the banjo school. It brought a fusillade of rebuttal, most of it convincing. Fogel and Engerman argued that blacks were willing collaborators in an un fair but workable capitalist system: owners got free labor, blacks got economic rewards and family stability if they played along...
...article, which appeared in the New York Review of Books, went on to attack Fogel's book, which Stanley Engerman coauthored, for "carelessness" in the interpretation and collection of statistical evidence and "extreme overindulgence in the heady art of pyramiding assumptions...
...quantitative history themselves often deter this broader evaluation of their work by their exaggerated claims to objectivity. "Success in this operation required, no less than in the operating room of a modern hospital, the adroit use of professional skills in a cool, detached manner." Fogel and Engerman write in their second volume. But it was not a detached analysis that told Fogel and Engerman how many whippings constitute harsh treatment of slaves, or how much confidence slaveholders had that the system would endure. So long as a researcher confines himself to recompiling old records, his work can indeed be devoid...
Time on the Cross is an ambitious enough work to contain a good deal of bad history. Its lapses would be easier to excuse if Fogel and Engerman were not so insistent on the revolutionary nature of their method. Often they exaggerate the myopia of earlier historians, in order to make their own conclusions seem more extraordinary. Their work is not, even in conception, the comprehensive evaluation the authors believe it to be. It is a work with new insights and with new speculation; more of the truth could be discovered if people spent more time thinking about the history...