Short communication In memory of Robert William Fogel Richard H. Steckel * Economics Department, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA Robert Fogel was a distinguished, versatile and prolific scholar of American economic history, especially railroads and slavery, and of historical aspects of nutrition in relation to mortality rates and economic growth. Born in New York City on July 1, 1926, he passed away after a brief illness on July 11, 2013 at Oak Lawn, Illinois. He spent most of his career at the University of Chicago (1964–1975; 1981–2013), but was also employed by the University of Rochester at the beginning of his career and at Harvard University from 1975 to 1981. He was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions at the University of Chicago from 1981 until his death. Here I discuss some milestones in his career. Robert Fogel won numerous honors and awards, including election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was president of several associations including the American Economic Association, the Economic History Association and the Social Science History Association. The most prominent award, however, came in 1993 when he shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences with Douglass North for having ‘‘Clarified the role of the railways for the development of the economy in the United States, and the economic role of slavery.’’ The press release went on to acknowledge a third area of research, economic demography, which is of greater interest to the audience of this journal: In particular ‘‘the changing rate of mortality over long periods of time and its relation to changes in the standard of living during recent centuries.’’ Energetic, creative, and durable, Professor Fogel pub- lished 22 books and some 90 articles, many arriving after he passed age 60, at a time when most scholars are on the downslope of their careers. He sprang to prominence in 1964 with the publication of Railroads and American Economic Growth, which used the new skills of cliometrics (statistical methods and economic theory in the study of history) to overturn conclusions long-held by transporta- tion historians on the pivotal contribution of the iron horse to American economic growth (Fogel, 1964). Canals, river boats and wagons would have done almost as well in distributing goods, at least in 1890. In 1974 Time on the Cross (written with Stanley Engerman) created a tempest for its reinterpretation of the economics of American slavery (Fogel and Engerman, 1974). Some readers reacted to the aggressive tone of the prose and others were provoked by the unintended suggestion that the authors were somehow apologizing for slavery. The book did contain flaws on the demography of slavery (regarding age at first birth and the impact of the slave trade on families) and nutritional aspects of their standard of living, which authors claimed was adequate relative to working class laborers in the North (it later turned out that children were particularly malnourished). Nevertheless Fogel and Engerman did leave an indelible imprint on the field with the conclusions that slave labor was intense, productive, and profitable and therefore a political or military solution was necessary to rid the country of the institution. In 1989 he published a summary Economics and Human Biology 12 (2014) 1–3 A R T I C L E I N F O Article history: Received 20 November 2013 Accepted 20 November 2013 Available online 1 December 2013 * Tel.: +1 614 292 5008; fax: +1 614 292 3906. E-mail address: Steckel.1@osu.edu Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Economics and Human Biology jo u rn al ho m epag e: h ttp ://ww w.els evier.c o m/lo cat e/ehb 1570-677X/$ – see front matter ß 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2013.11.002