Thomas Haskell is the McCann Professor of History at Rice University and the author of Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History. (December 1997)
Death of the Guilds: Professions, States, and the Advance of Capitalism, 1930 to the Present
by Elliott A. Krause
The bloody contest between capitalism and socialism unexpectedly came to an end in 1989 after a struggle that gripped the world for a century and a half. Of course appearances may prove deceiving; movements and institutions have been known to survive defeat and prosper under new names. Still, the tides …
The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America
by Burton J. Bledstein
Ten years ago Paul Goodman tried to teach a course on “Professionalism,” at the New School for Social Research. The course failed. Goodman watched with mounting embarrassment as the journalist, the physician, the engineer, the architect, and other friends he brought to speak to the class were dismissed as “liars,” …
Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross
by Herbert G. Gutman
"A Symposium on Time on the Cross"
edited by Gary M. Walton
Anyone who recalls the uncritical enthusiasm that greeted the publication of Time on the Cross a year and a half ago will be shocked by the three volumes of criticism under review. Their combined effect is devastating. A study of slavery that at first seemed exceptionally important, if contentious, now …
The carnival of publicity attending the publication of Time on the Cross suggests that the authors, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, desire an audience embracing not only econometric historians but all reasonable men. I am not an econometric historian or a specialist in the history of slavery, but I am …