Download or read book Mocking Eugenics written by Ewa Barbara Luczak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-28 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilize what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humor to attack the contemporaneous science of heredity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American studies.
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo American Thought written by Marouf Arif Hasian and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging in subject from England's poor laws to the Human Genome Project, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought is one of the first books to look at the history and development of the eugenics movement in Anglo-American culture. Unlike other works that focus on the movement's historical aberrancies or the claims of its hardline proponents, this study highlights the often unnoticed ways in which the language and ideas of eugenics have permeated democratic discourse. Marouf A. Hasian, Jr. not only examines the attempts of philosophers, scientists, and politicians to balance the rights of the individual against the duties of the state, but also shows how African Americans, Catholics, women, and other communities--dominant and marginalized--have appropriated or confronted the rhetoric of eugenics. Hasian contends that "eugenics" is an ambiguous term that has allowed people to voice their concerns on a number of social issues--a form of discourse that influences the way ordinary citizens make sense of their material and spiritual world. While biological determinism and social necessity are discussed in the works of Plato, Malthus, and Darwin, among others, with theories ranging from equality for all to natural superiority, it is Galton's observations on "positive" and "negative" eugenics that have been widely used to justify a variety of social and political projects--including the sterilization and segregation of the unfit, immigration restrictions, marriage regulations, substance abuse, physical and mental testing, and the establishment of health programs that sought to improve "hygiene." Women, African Americans, and other marginalized communities, for instance, have at times lost reproductive rights in the name of "liberty," "opportunity," or "necessity." Eugenical arguments are more than a creation of pseudo-science or misapplied genetical analysis, Hasian determines; they are also rhetorical fragments, representing the ideologies of multitudes of social actors who, across time, have reconfigured these ideas to legitimize many agendas.
Download or read book War Against the Weak written by Edwin Black and published by Dialog Press. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War Against the Weak is the gripping chronicle documenting how American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele -- and then created the modern movement of "human genetics." Some 60,000 Americans were sterilized under laws in 27 states. This expanded edition includes two new essays on state genocide.
Download or read book Preaching Eugenics written by Christine Rosen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Preaching Eugenics' tells how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders confronted and, in many cases, enthusiastically embraced eugenics - a movement that embodied progressive attitudes about modern science at the time.
Download or read book Popular Eugenics written by Susan Currell and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Eugenics in American Political Life written by Shannon Bow O’Brien and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Eugenic Nation written by Alexandra Minna Stern and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With an emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation explores the long and unsettled history of eugenics in the United States. This expanded second edition includes shocking details that demonstrate that the story is far from over. Alexandra Minna Stern explores the unauthorized sterilization of female inmates in California state prisons and ongoing reparations for North Carolina victims of sterilization, as well as the topics of race-based intelligence tests, school segregation, the U.S. Border Patrol, tropical medicine, the environmental movement, and opposition to better breeding. Radically new and relevant, this edition draws from recently uncovered historical records to demonstrate patterns of racial bias in California's sterilization program and to recover personal experiences of reproductive injustice. Stern connects the eugenic past to the genomic present with attention to the ethical and social implications of emerging genetic technologies"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Unnatural Selections written by Daylanne K. English and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics in the Progressive Era. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding. English's interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimke as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes the Crisis magazine as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race. English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot. Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.
Download or read book Modernism and Eugenics written by M. Turda and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism and Eugenics comprehensively explores modern Europe's fixation with eugenic programmes of racial and national purification. It convincingly demonstrates that between 1870 and 1940 eugenicists were not only preoccupied with rescuing the individual from the anomie of modernity but equally championed a glorious racial destiny for the nation.
Download or read book Searchlights on Health The Science of Eugenics written by J. L. Nichols and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Searchlights on Health: The Science of Eugenics' is a non-fiction aimed at educating women on and men on their sexual health according to the standards of the time. Some of the language (and topics) may be dated to today's sensibilities, but it's still a worthwhile read to take a glance of what constitutes as early sex education for young adults.
Download or read book American Eugenics written by Nancy Ordover and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of eugenics ideology in the United States and its ongoing presence in contemporary life. The Nazis may have given eugenics its negative connotations, but the practice--and the "science" that supports it--is still disturbingly alive in America in anti-immigration initiatives, the quest for a "gay gene, " and theories of collective intelligence. Tracing the historical roots and persistence of eugenics in the United States, Nancy Ordover explores the political and cultural climate that has endowed these campaigns with mass appeal and scientific legitimacy. American Eugenics demonstrates how biological theories of race, gender, and sexuality are crucially linked through a concern with regulating the "unfit." These links emerge in Ordover's examination of three separate but ultimately related American eugenics campaigns: early twentieth-century anti-immigration crusades; medical models and interventions imposed on (and sometimes embraced by) lesbians, gays, transgendered people, and bisexuals; and the compulsory sterilization of poor women and women of color. Throughout, her work reveals how constructed notions of race, gender, sexuality, and nation are put to ideological uses and how "faith in science" can undermine progressive social movements, drawing liberals and conservatives alike into eugenics-based discourse and policies.
Download or read book The Nazi Connection written by Stefan Kuhl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-02-14 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1924, he held up a foreign law as a model for his program of racial purification: The U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which prohibited the immigration of those with hereditary illnesses and entire ethnic groups. When the Nazis took power in 1933, they installed a program of eugenics--the attempted "improvement" of the population through forced sterilization and marriage controls--that consciously drew on the U.S. example. By then, many American states had long had compulsory sterilization laws for "defectives," upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927. Small wonder that the Nazi laws led one eugenics activist in Virginia to complain, "The Germans are beating us at our own game." In The Nazi Connection, Stefan Kühl uncovers the ties between the American eugenics movement and the Nazi program of racial hygiene, showing that many American scientists actively supported Hitler's policies. After introducing us to the recently resurgent problem of scientific racism, Kühl carefully recounts the history of the eugenics movement, both in the United States and internationally, demonstrating how widely the idea of sterilization as a genetic control had become accepted by the early twentieth century. From the first, the American eugenicists led the way with radical ideas. Their influence led to sterilization laws in dozens of states--laws which were studied, and praised, by the German racial hygienists. With the rise of Hitler, the Germans enacted compulsory sterilization laws partly based on the U.S. experience, and American eugenists took pride in their influence on Nazi policies. Kühl recreates astonishing scenes of American eugenicists travelling to Germany to study the new laws, publishing scholarly articles lionizing the Nazi eugenics program, and proudly comparing personal notes from Hitler thanking them for their books. Even after the outbreak of war, he writes, the American eugenicists frowned upon Hitler's totalitarian government, but not his sterilization laws. So deep was the failure to recognize the connection between eugenics and Hitler's genocidal policies, that a prominent liberal Jewish eugenicist who had been forced to flee Germany found it fit to grumble that the Nazis "took over our entire plan of eugenic measures." By 1945, when the murderous nature of the Nazi government was made perfectly clear, the American eugenicists sought to downplay the close connections between themselves and the German program. Some of them, in fact, had sought to distance themselves from Hitler even before the war. But Stefan Kühl's deeply documented book provides a devastating indictment of the influence--and aid--provided by American scientists for the most comprehensive attempt to enforce racial purity in world history.
Download or read book Sterilized by the State written by Randall Hansen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-26 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how eugenic sterilization policies were maintained after the 1940s in the United States and Canada despite the discrediting of such theories by comparable Nazi Germany policies. It focuses on the individual experience of victims of sterilization, the doctors concerned, and the mental health institutions that protected the system.
Download or read book Eugenics and Education in America written by Ann Gibson Winfield and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Education in America was designed to organize, classify, and sort students according to a definition of ability and human worth provided by a racialized scientism known as eugenics - an ideology whose ultimate goal was the establishment of a superior White race. Eugenicists targeted entire ethnic groups, the urban poor, rural «White trash,» the sexually «deviant,» Blacks, Jews, Native Americans, Asians, Latino/as, and anyone who did not fit with the pseudo-scientifically established «superior» Nordic race. Education leaders, complaining of children of «worm-eaten stock,» established an enduring system to organize and sort students according to perceived societal worth. In exposing and addressing eugenics' place in our educational system, this book provides a groundbreaking addition to, and exceptional correction of, the history of curriculum in America.
Download or read book An Image of God written by Sharon M. Leon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first half of the twentieth century, supporters of the eugenics movement offered an image of a racially transformed America by curtailing the reproduction of “unfit” members of society. Through institutionalization, compulsory sterilization, the restriction of immigration and marriages, and other methods, eugenicists promised to improve the population—a policy agenda that was embraced by many leading intellectuals and public figures. But Catholic activists and thinkers across the United States opposed many of these measures, asserting that “every man, even a lunatic, is an image of God, not a mere animal." In An Image of God, Sharon Leon examines the efforts of American Catholics to thwart eugenic policies, illuminating the ways in which Catholic thought transformed the public conversation about individual rights, the role of the state, and the intersections of race, community, and family. Through an examination of the broader questions raised in this debate, Leon casts new light on major issues that remain central in American political life today: the institution of marriage, the role of government, and the separation of church and state. This is essential reading in the history of religion, science, politics, and human rights.
Download or read book Three Generations No Imbeciles written by Paul A. Lombardo and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition includes a new afterword that identifies the role the Buck story plays in the Supreme Court's review of emerging state laws that seek to limit access to abortion. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from U.S. Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. It has been more than a decade since Paul A. Lombardo's classic Three Generations, No Imbeciles first exposed the Buck case's fraudulent roots. During that time, several of the remaining twentieth-century eugenic sterilization statutes have finally been repealed, and reparations to sterilization survivors have been paid in two states. Discussion of the Buck case has once again engendered controversy in the courts. The Wisconsin Supreme Court invoked Buck most recently in a debate over the power of the state to enact restrictions on citizens and businesses during the COVID-19 crisis, and the US Supreme Court cited Three Generations, No Imbeciles in arguments over the newest state laws seeking to limit access to abortion. This updated edition collects and analyzes information related to events and trends discussed in the earlier volume and includes a completely new afterword, "Looking Back at Buck," that explains how the case remains a key feature of public discourse about disability, government power, and reproductive rights. It also presents restored copies of the letters of Carrie Buck and points readers to an online archive of legal documents, images, and other material relevant to the case. The book remains a key resource for law school faculties, legal and medical historians, and anyone with an interest in the history of reproduction in the United States. "Startling."—Reason "Compelling and well-researched . . . Three Generations, No Imbeciles gives Carrie Buck's long-untold story the attention it deserves."—Harvard Law Review "Three Generations provides valuable, new, and timely revelations for students and professional scholars across many disciplines."—Disability Studies Quarterly "Meticulously detailed and researched history . . . this book is enjoyable, thought provoking, and troubling in equal measure. I highly recommend it."—Psychiatric Services
Download or read book For the Betterment of the Race written by S. Kühl and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Racism, race hygiene, eugenics, and their histories have for a long time been studied in terms of individual countries, whether genocidal ideology in Nazi Germany or scientific racial theories in the United States. As this study demonstrates, however, eugenic racial policy and scientific racism alike had a strongly international dimension. Concepts such as a 'Racial Confederation of European Peoples' or a 'blonde internationalism' marked the thinking and the actions of many eugenicists, undergirding transnational networks that persist even today. Author Stefan Kühl provides here a historical foundation for this phenomenon, contextualizing the international eugenics movement in relation to National Socialist race policies and showing how intensively eugenicists worked to disseminate their beliefs throughout the world.
