The Hour of Eugenics"

The Hour of Eugenics Author: Nancy Leys Stepan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Eugenics was a term coined in 1883 to name the scientific and social theory which advocated "race improvement" through selective human breeding. In Europe and the United States the eugenics movement found many supporters before it was finally discredited by its association with the racist ideology of Nazi Germany. Examining for the first time how eugenics was taken up by scientists and social reformers in Latin America, Nancy Leys Stepan compares the eugenics movements in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina with the more familiar cases of Britain, the United States, and Germany.In this highly original account, Stepan sheds new light on the role of science in reformulating issues of race, gender, reproduction, and public health in an era when the focus on national identity was particularly intense. Drawing upon a rich body of evidence concerning the technical publications and professional meetings of Latin American eugenicists, she examines how they adapted eugenic principles to local contexts between the world wars. Stepan shows that Latin American eugenicists diverged considerably from their counterparts in Europe and the United States in their ideological approach and their interpretations of key texts concerning heredity.

The Hour of Eugenics"

The Hour of Eugenics Author: Nancy Leys Stepan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Eugenics was a term coined in 1883 to name the scientific and social theory which advocated "race improvement" through selective human breeding. In Europe and the United States the eugenics movement found many supporters before it was finally discredited by its association with the racist ideology of Nazi Germany. Examining for the first time how eugenics was taken up by scientists and social reformers in Latin America, Nancy Leys Stepan compares the eugenics movements in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina with the more familiar cases of Britain, the United States, and Germany.In this highly original account, Stepan sheds new light on the role of science in reformulating issues of race, gender, reproduction, and public health in an era when the focus on national identity was particularly intense. Drawing upon a rich body of evidence concerning the technical publications and professional meetings of Latin American eugenicists, she examines how they adapted eugenic principles to local contexts between the world wars. Stepan shows that Latin American eugenicists diverged considerably from their counterparts in Europe and the United States in their ideological approach and their interpretations of key texts concerning heredity.

Eradication

Eradication PDF Author: Nancy Leys Stepan
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 186189967X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
The dream of a world completely free of disease may seem utopian, but eradication—used in its modern sense to mean the reduction of the number of cases of a disease to zero by deliberate public health interventions—has been pursued repeatedly. Campaigns against yellow fever, malaria, and smallpox have been among the largest, most costly programs ever undertaken in international public health. But only one so far has been successful—that against smallpox. And yet in 2007 Bill and Melinda Gates surprised the world with the announcement that they were committing their foundation to eradicating malaria. Polio eradication is another of their priorities. Are such costly programs really justifiable? The first comprehensive account of the major disease-eradication campaigns from the early twentieth century right up to the present, Eradication places these ambitious goals in their broad historical and contemporary contexts. From the life and times of the American arch-eradicationist Dr. Fred Lowe Soper (1893-1977), who was at the center of many of the campaigns and controversies surrounding eradication in his lifetime, to debates between proponents of primary health care approaches to ill health versus the eradicationists, Nancy Leys Stepan’s narrative suggests that today these differing public health approaches may be complementary rather than in conflict. Enlightening for general readers and specialists alike, Eradication is an illuminating look at some of the most urgent problems of health and disease around the world.

The Eugenics Wars Volume Two

The Eugenics Wars Volume Two PDF Author: Greg Cox
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471107914
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
""A strange, violent period in your history."" -- Spock Many unanswered questions remain about the terrible Eugenics Wars that raged on Earth during the 1990s, an apocalyptic conflict that brought civilization to the brink of a new dark age. Centuries later, as Capt. James T. Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise™ are forced to defend a colony of genetically enhanced humans against Klingon aggression and sabotage, Kirk must probe deeper into the past -- and into the glory days of one of the greatest adversaries he has ever faced. 1992. Almost twenty years ago, Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, undercover operatives for an unknown alien civilization, failed to prevent the Chrysalis Project from creating an entire generation of supermen and women, genetically engineered to be stronger, smarter, and more resourceful than ordinary human beings. Now, at last, the children of Chrysalis have grown to adulthood, and are rapidly demonstrating that superior abilities spawn superior ambition. Perhaps the most formidable of this new breed of supermen is the charismatic Khan Noonien Singh. Working behind the scenes of history as head of a vast global conspiracy, Khan's power soon stretches across a quarter of the planet, but that is only the beginning of his grand design. Determined to unite humanity beneath the enlightened rule of a genetic elite, Khan dreams of leading his fellow superhumans to complete and total domination of the world. But several of his gene-engineered brothers and sisters have equally grandiose visions for the future, visions that recognize no one but themselves as supreme ruler. Gary Seven and Roberta watch in horror as the children of Chrysalis wage a covert war against one another, threatening the safety of millions and the future of the entire world! The Eugenics Wars: Volume Two is an earth-shattering thriller that reveals the secret history of the twentieth century -- and the ultimate destiny of the tyrant known as Khan.

The Guarded Gate

The Guarded Gate PDF Author: Daniel Okrent
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1476798052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE “100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR” BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW From the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call—this “rigorously historical” (The Washington Post) and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America keep out “inferiors” in the 1920s is “a sobering, valuable contribution to discussions about immigration” (Booklist). A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than forty years. Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his trademark lively and authoritative style, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is “a masterful, sobering, thoughtful, and necessary book” that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.

Unnatural Selections

Unnatural Selections PDF Author: Daylanne K. English
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863521
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
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.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics PDF Author: Alison Bashford
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195373146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 607

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Book Description
Philippa Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, and The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset. --

Illiberal Reformers

Illiberal Reformers PDF Author: Thomas C. Leonard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400874076
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors but to exclude them.

Building the New Man

Building the New Man PDF Author: Francesco Cassata
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9639776831
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Based on previously unexplored archival documentation, this book offers the first general overview of the history of Italian eugenics, not limited to the decades of Fascist regime, but instead ranging from the beginning of the 1900s to the first half of the 1970s. The Author discusses several fundamental themes of the comparative history of eugenics: the importance of the Latin eugenic model; the relationship between eugenics and fascism; the influence of Catholicism on the eugenic discourse and the complex links between genetics and eugenics. It examines the Liberal pre-fascist period and the post-WW2 transition from fascist and racial eugenics to medical and human genetics. As far as fascist eugenics is concerned, the book provides a refreshing analysis, considering Italian eugenics as the most important case-study in order to define Latin eugenics as an alternative model to its Anglo-American, German and Scandinavian counterparts. Analyses in detail the nature-nurture debate during the State racist campaign in fascist Italy (1938–1943) as a boundary tool in the contraposition between the different institutional, political and ideological currents of fascist racism.

Picturing Tropical Nature

Picturing Tropical Nature PDF Author: Nancy Stepan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801438813
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
"Picturing Tropical Nature reflects on the work of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and artists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Louis Agassiz, Sir Patrick Manson, and Margaret Mee. Their careers illuminate several aspects of tropicalization: science and art in the making of tropical pictures; the commercial and cultural boom in things tropical in the modern period; photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races; antitropicalism and its role in an emerging environmentalist sensibility; and visual depictions of disease in the new tropical medicine."--Jacket.

Better for All the World

Better for All the World PDF Author: Harry Bruinius
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375713050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
A timely and gripping history of the controversial eugenics movement in America–and the scientists, social reformers and progressives who supported it.In Better for All the World, Harry Bruinius charts the little known history of eugenics in America–a movement that began in the early twentieth century and resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 65,000 people. Bruinius tells the stories of Emma and Carrie Buck, two women trapped in poverty who became the test case in the 1927 supreme court decision allowing forced sterilization for those deemed unfit to procreate. From the reformers who turned local charities into government-run welfare systems promoting social and moral purity, to the influence the American policies had on Nazi Germany’s development of “racial hygiene,” Bruinius masterfully exposes the players and legislation behind one of America’s darkest secrets.