“We thought there’d be a lot of discussion within the history profession for a while, but the public reaction is something else,” Professor Engerman told The Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester in May 1974. What is interesting is that such a conclusion is now necessary to convince white people.”Several months after “Time on the Cross” was published, about 100 historians, economists and sociologists gathered for a three-day conference to discuss the book at the University of Rochester, where Professor Engerman and Professor Fogel taught. The debate was so contentious that The Democrat and Chronicle described it as “scholarly warfare.” Some of the criticism focused on the two men’s emphasis on statistics over the brutal realities of slavery. “They deny the slave his voice, his initiative and his humanity,” the historian Kenneth M. Stampp said at the conference. “They reject the untidy world in which masters and slaves, with their rational and irrational perceptions, survived as best they could, and replace it with a model of a tidy, rational world that never was.”But the Marxist historian Eugene D. Genovese, whose own book about slavery, “Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slave Made,” was also published in 1974, called “Time on the Cross” an “important work” that had “broken open a lot of questions about issues that were swept under the rug before.”

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Persons: there’d, Engerman, Fogel —, Douglass C, —, Kenneth B, Clark, “, Toni Morrison, Fogel, Kenneth M, Stampp, Eugene D, Genovese, Jordan, ” Organizations: New York Times Magazine, University of Rochester Locations: Rochester