SWEET BRIAR, Va.- Nobel Prize winning economist and historian Robert
William Fogel will discuss personal recollections of his quest to
understand American slavery in a lecture titled “The Slavery Debates, 1952-
1990: a Memoir,” Tuesday, March, 11 in the Sweet Briar College Memorial
Chapel at 8 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

University of Virginia professors Joseph Miller, a historian of Africa, and
Michael Holt, a specialist in pre-Civil War American political history,
will comment following Fogel’s lecture offering evidence in support of and
against Fogel’s findings.

Rounding out the evening, the three debate participants will take questions
on the topic of slavery and its impact on the development of American
civilization from the audience.

Fogel’s book, “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,”
co-written with Stanley Engerman, caused great public controversy for
presenting evidence that American slavery was more profitable and less
cruel than generally thought. Fogel’s personal recollections about his
research and the debates shaping it will be at the center of his lecture.

In 1989, Fogel published the first of a four volume work, “Without Consent
and Contract:  The Rise and Fall of American Slavery,” which clarified the
moral case against slavery, presented further research and traced the
development of a politically persuasive case against slavery by the late
1850s.

Fogel’s pioneering work in historical economics earned him the Nobel Prize
in Economics in 1993.

University of Virginia professors Michael F. Holt and Joseph T. Miller will
add their insight in response to Fogel’s lecture. Holt is the author
of “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and
the Onset of the Civil War” and co-author of the popular college
textbook “The Civil War and Reconstruction.” Miller, who was the editor of
the “Journal of African History” from 1990-1996 and the president of the
American Historical Association in 1999, co-edited of the “Macmillan
Encyclopedia of World Slavery.”

Fogel, the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American
Institutions in the Graduate School of Business at the University of
Chicago, directs the Center for Population Economics and is a member of the
Department of Economics and of the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago.

Since the late 1980s, Fogel’s research has examined the secular decline in
mortality and the changing pattern of aging and disease over the life cycle
in the United States, Europe and developing countries. The most recent
findings from this project are published in his book, “The Escape from
Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third
World.”

Fogel has earned numerous awards and prizes, including the Arthur C. Cole
Prize (1968), the Schumpeter Prize (1971), the Bancroft Prize in American
History (1975), and the Gustavus Myers Award for Human Rights (1990).

Following the debate, there will be a reception in the foyer of Memorial
Chapel. For more information about the event, please contact Kate Chavigny,
Department of History, Sweet Briar College at 434-381-6234, or visit
http://www.slaverydebates.sbc.edu

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