In his most ambitious book since Time on the Cross, the Nobel Prize-winning economist looks to the nation's past to discover the strong link between technologically induced cycles of religiousness--or awakenings--in American history and attitudes toward poverty, education, and social equality. Line drawings. Tables.

Two distinguished historians, one an advocate of the new scientific or "cliometric" history and the other a traditional historian, debate the validity of their respective methods of studying the past. While they differ sharply on many issues, in the end they agree that history is a vigorous, evolving discipline able to absorb the best of both scientific and humanistic thought.
"Fogel asserts persuasively that cliometrics is best characterized by the explicit use of social science theory, and only secondly by its use of quantification.... Elton elegantly defends the traditional virtues of...

Written to accompany Without Consent or Contract, this book is part of a two volume set which has been designed to fill out the portrait of slavery with detailed analyses of specific areas. This book looks at the conditions of slave life and the transition to freedom.

In an Afterword added in 1989, the authors assess their findings in the light of recent scholarship and debate.

Over the past quarter-century, Robert William Fogel has blazed new trails in scholarship on the lives of the slaves in the American South. Now he presents the dramatic rise and fall of the "peculiar institution," as the abolitionist movement rose into a powerful political force that pulled down a seemingly impregnable system.