ABSTRACT
Robert William Fogel has been the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions, Professor of Economics, and Director of the Center for Population Economics in the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, all since 1981, and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, as well as founding Director (1977-91) of the Bureau’s program on the “Development of the American Economy.” He was born in New York, New York in 1926 and was educated at Cornell University (B.A., 1948), at Columbia University (M.A., 1960) and at The Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D., 1963). He has held positions at the University of Rochester (1960-4) and at both Rochester and Chicago from 1965 to 1975 before moving to Harvard University for the years 1975-1981. He has served on the editorial boards of Explorations in Economic History and of Social Science History, was a founder in 1975 of The Social Science History Association, and was President of the Economic History Association (1978). In 1972 he was elected Fellow of The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Member of the National Academy of Sciences the following year. With co-author Stanley Engerman, he was awarded the 1975 Bancroft Prize in American history for Time on the Cross. In 1993 Robert Fogel, with Douglass North, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. The interview was conducted by telephone on July 14, 1990 by S W and J L. Sam Williamson writes:
To me, Bob is an exemplar of the old expression “a scholar and a gentleman.” I remember stopping by his office one summer in the mid 1960s to discuss a dissertation topic I was thinking about. It made no difference to him that I was only a graduate student from Purdue. He spent a couple of hours with me and insisted on taking me to lunch as well. Of course I was no exception to Bob’s desire to nurture those who were finding their way into cliometrics at the time; the best testimony to his role in the field are the
scores of Bob’s former students who are today among the world’s leading economic historians.
