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Article: Technical Papers, vol. 2, Conditions of Slave Life and the Transition to Freedom.
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- January 1, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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According to Nobel prize winner Robert William Fogel, and Stanley L. Engerman, the years of "black enslavement and the Civil War in which they terminated were our nation's time on the cross." In 1974, the findings in Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, and its supplement Evidence and Methods, which appeared to constitute a major scholarly breakthrough, sparked a critical historical debate. Contending that the antebellum South's slave-based economy was more efficient than the North's free-labor system, and criticizing what they saw as the obsolete conventional interpretation of slavery, Fogel and Engerman offered, through the medium of loads of ...