History’s Corridors

History, wrote T. S. Eliot in “Gerontion,” has many contrived corridors. In Time on the Cross Fogel and Engerman certainly open up one of them, and in so doing threaten a whole array of vested interests and attitudes.

Briefly, Fogel and Engerman employed a revolutionary historiographical technique that only recently became feasible because of the development of computer technology. They and their research assistants drew together and programed an enormous amount of material previously moldering in the archives: census figures for 1850 and 1860, farm records, invoices, probate court records on the sale of 80,000 slaves, and so on. All of this material was fed into high-speed computers and various hypotheses were tested against it. The result was a bombshell: the received view of the lot of American slaves, the view that has prevailed from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Simon Legree down to William Styron and Nat Turner has had to go into the wastebasket.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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History, wrote T. S. Eliot in “Gerontion,” has many contrived corridors. In Time on the Cross Fogel and Engerman certainly open up one of them, and in so doing threaten a whole array of vested interests and attitudes.

Briefly, Fogel and Engerman employed a revolutionary historiographical technique that only recently became feasible because of the development of computer technology. They and their research assistants drew together and programed an enormous amount of material previously moldering in the archives: census figures for 1850 and 1860, farm records, invoices, probate court records on the sale of 80,000 slaves, and so on. All of this material was fed into high-speed computers and various hypotheses were tested against it. The result was a bombshell: the received view of the lot of American slaves, the view that has prevailed from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Simon Legree down to William Styron and Nat Turner has had to go into the wastebasket.