A Century of Eugenics in America

A Century of Eugenics in America PDF Author: Paul A. Lombardo
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253222699
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This volume assesses the history of eugenics in the United States and its status in the age of the Human Genome Project. The essays explore the early support of compulsory sterilization by doctors and legislators.

A Century of Eugenics in America

A Century of Eugenics in America PDF Author: Paul A. Lombardo
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253222699
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This volume assesses the history of eugenics in the United States and its status in the age of the Human Genome Project. The essays explore the early support of compulsory sterilization by doctors and legislators.

Sterilized by the State

Sterilized by the State PDF Author: Randall Hansen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110703292X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
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.

An Image of God

An Image of God PDF Author: Sharon M. Leon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022603903X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
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.

Popular Eugenics

Popular Eugenics PDF Author: Susan Currell
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 082141691X
Category : Culture in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Publisher description

Pure America

Pure America PDF Author: Elizabeth Catte
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781953368195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia's twentieth-century eugenics program was a manifestation of white supremacy, a means of controlling "troublesome" women and a philosophy that helped remove poor people from valuable land."--

Imbeciles

Imbeciles PDF Author: Adam Cohen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101980834
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction One of America’s great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court’s infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of “undesirable” citizens the law of the land In 1927, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling so disturbing, ignorant, and cruel that it stands as one of the great injustices in American history. In Imbeciles, bestselling author Adam Cohen exposes the court’s decision to allow the sterilization of a young woman it wrongly thought to be “feebleminded” and to champion the mass eugenic sterilization of undesirable citizens for the greater good of the country. The 8–1 ruling was signed by some of the most revered figures in American law—including Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former U.S. president; and Louis Brandeis, a progressive icon. Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered by many the greatest Supreme Court justice in history, wrote the majority opinion, including the court’s famous declaration “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Imbeciles is the shocking story of Buck v. Bell, a legal case that challenges our faith in American justice. A gripping courtroom drama, it pits a helpless young woman against powerful scientists, lawyers, and judges who believed that eugenic measures were necessary to save the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.” At the center was Carrie Buck, who was born into a poor family in Charlottesville, Virginia, and taken in by a foster family, until she became pregnant out of wedlock. She was then declared “feebleminded” and shipped off to the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. Buck v. Bell unfolded against the backdrop of a nation in the thrall of eugenics, which many Americans thought would uplift the human race. Congress embraced this fervor, enacting the first laws designed to prevent immigration by Italians, Jews, and other groups charged with being genetically inferior. Cohen shows how Buck arrived at the colony at just the wrong time, when influential scientists and politicians were looking for a “test case” to determine whether Virginia’s new eugenic sterilization law could withstand a legal challenge. A cabal of powerful men lined up against her, and no one stood up for her—not even her lawyer, who, it is now clear, was in collusion with the men who wanted her sterilized. In the end, Buck’s case was heard by the Supreme Court, the institution established by the founders to ensure that justice would prevail. The court could have seen through the false claim that Buck was a threat to the gene pool, or it could have found that forced sterilization was a violation of her rights. Instead, Holmes, a scion of several prominent Boston Brahmin families, who was raised to believe in the superiority of his own bloodlines, wrote a vicious, haunting decision upholding Buck’s sterilization and imploring the nation to sterilize many more. Holmes got his wish, and before the madness ended some sixty to seventy thousand Americans were sterilized. Cohen overturns cherished myths and demolishes lauded figures in relentless pursuit of the truth. With the intellectual force of a legal brief and the passion of a front-page exposé, Imbeciles is an ardent indictment of our champions of justice and our optimistic faith in progress, as well as a triumph of American legal and social history.

Eugenic Nation

Eugenic Nation PDF Author: Alexandra Minna Stern
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520285069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
"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.

War Against the Weak

War Against the Weak PDF Author: Edwin Black
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9781568583211
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description
An investigative journalist peels back the lid on a shameful century of mass sterilization and human breeding programs in the U.S. that began in 1904 with a large-scale eugenics movement, a movement that has been reborn in the modern era with the rise of genetics and human engineering. Reprint.

Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics PDF Author: Adam Rutherford
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324035617
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
How did an obscure academic idea pave the way to the Holocaust within just fifty years? Control is a book about eugenics, what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls “a defining idea of the twentieth century.” Inspired by Darwin’s ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for improving the British population, and quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics looms large today as the advances in genetics in the last thirty years—from the sequencing of the human genome to modern gene editing techniques—have brought the idea of population purification back into the mainstream. Eugenics has “a short history, but a long past,” Rutherford writes. The first half of Control is the history of an idea, from its roots in key philosophical texts of the classical world all the way into their genocidal enactment in the twentieth century. The second part of the book explores how eugenics operates today, as part of our language and culture, as part of current political and racial discussions, and as an eternal temptation to powerful people who wish to improve society through reproductive control. With disarming wit and scientific precision, Rutherford explains why eugenics still figures prominently in the twenty-first century, despite its genocidal past. And he confronts insidious recurring questions—did eugenics work in Nazi Germany? And could it work today?—revealing the intellectual bankruptcy of the idea, and the scientific impossibility of its realization.

Defending the Master Race

Defending the Master Race PDF Author: Jonathan Spiro
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 158465810X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
A historical rediscovery of one of the heroic founders of the conservation movement who was also one of the most infamous racists in American history