Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery

"With one stroke [this book] turned around a whole field of interpretation and exposed the frailty of history done without science" (New York Times Book Review). First published in 1974, Fogel and Engerman's groundbreaking book reexamined the economic foundations of American slavery, marking "the start of a new period of slavery scholarship and some searching revisions of a national tradition" (C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books). In an Afterword added in 1989, the authors assess their findings in the light of recent scholarship and debate.