Herbert Gutman focused on the history of workers and slaves in the United States. He is considered one of the co-founders and primary proponents of the "new labor history," a school of thought that believes ordinary people have not received the proper amount of attention from historians. Gutman was often criticized for overemphasizing the experiences of working people and blacks as historical agents, and "sometimes summarily dismissed as a 'romantic' and lacking in sophisticated 'theory'…". Gutman is best known for two major studies of slavery in America:
Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of "Time on the Cross" (1975) and
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976), and for
Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (1976).
Slavery and the Numbers Game "Slavery and the Numbers Game" deconstructs the assumptions and methodology in the book
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, by
Robert William Fogel and
Stanley L. Engerman.
Time on the Cross denied that slavery was unprofitable, a moribund institution (even though, in fact, few academics said or believed that by this time), inefficient, and extremely harsh for typical slave. The book received a large amount of mainstream media attention for its revisionism, impressed the historical community with its use of
cliometrics, and outraged many in the civil rights community (with some calling it a rallying cry for racism). Gutman systematically took Fogel and Engerman to task on a variety of fronts. He noted the authors were extremely careless in their calculations, and often used the wrong measurement to estimate the harshness of slavery. For example, Fogel and Engerman assumed that slave couples moved west together with their owners, based on their analysis of probate records and invoices from slave sales in New Orleans, and therefore argued that the slave trade related did not destroy black families. Gutman challenged this argument, as Fogel and Engerman seemed to ignore the fact that slave’s spouses were not always sold to the same master. Furthermore, the authors of
Time on the Cross did not take into account the friends and extended family of slaves left behind, again ignoring the disruptive impact this had on slave families and communities. In
Slavery and the Numbers Game, Gutman argued that Fogel and Engerman chose their examples poorly, focussing on plantations which were unreflective of broader southern society. Gutman roundly criticized Fogel and Engerman on a host of other claims as well, including the lack of evidence for systematic and regular rewards and a failure to consider the effect public whipping would have on other slaves. Gutman also argued that Fogel and Engerman had fallen prey to an ideological pitfall by assuming that most of those enslaved had assimilated the
Protestant work ethic. If they had such an ethic, then the system of punishments and rewards outlined in
Time on the Cross would support Fogel and Engerman's thesis. Gutman conclusively showed, however, that most slaves had not adopted this ethic at all and that slavery's carrot-and-stick approach to work had not shaped the slave worldview to mimic that of their owners. Gutman emphasizes the slaves' responses to their treatment at the hands of slaveowners. He shows that slaves labored, not because they shared values and goals with their masters, but because of the omnipresent threat of 'negative incentives,' primarily physical violence.
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, published a year after
Slavery and the Numbers Game, is a detailed study of black family life under slavery in the United States. The book draws on census data, diaries, family records, bills of sale and other records, and argues that slavery did not break up the black family. Gutman concluded that most black families largely remained intact despite slavery. Gutman further argued that black families also remained intact during the first wave of migration to the North after the
Civil War (although he remained open to arguments about black family collapse in the 1930s and 1940s). ==Memberships and awards==