Popular Eugenics

Popular Eugenics
Author: Susan Currell
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2006
Genre: Culture in motion pictures
ISBN: 082141691X

Publisher description

Popular Eugenics

Popular Eugenics
Author: Susan Currell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006
Genre: Culture in motion pictures
ISBN: 9780821416921

Publisher description

Eugenics

Eugenics
Author: Philippa Levine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2017
Genre: Eugenics
ISBN: 0199385904

A concise and gripping account of eugenics from its origins in the twentieth century and beyond.

Eugenic Design

Eugenic Design
Author: Christina Cogdell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2004
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0812221222

In 1939, Vogue magazine invited commercial designer Raymond Loewy and eight of his contemporaries—including Walter Dorwin Teague, Egmont Arens, and Henry Dreyfuss—to design a dress for the "Woman of the Future" as part of its special issue promoting the New York World's Fair and its theme, "The World of Tomorrow." While focusing primarily on her clothing and accessories, many commented as well on the future woman's physique, predicting that her body and mind would be perfected through the implementation of eugenics. Industrial designers' fascination with eugenics—especially that of Norman Bel Geddes—began during the previous decade, and its principles permeated their theories of the modern design style known as "streamlining." In Eugenic Design, Christina Cogdell charts new territory in the history of industrial design, popular science, and American culture in the 1930s by uncovering the links between streamline design and eugenics, the pseudoscientific belief that the best human traits could—and should—be cultivated through selective breeding. Streamline designers approached products the same way eugenicists approached bodies. Both considered themselves to be reformers advancing evolutionary progress through increased efficiency, hygiene and the creation of a utopian "ideal type." Cogdell reconsiders the popular streamline style in U.S. industrial design and proposes that in theory, rhetoric, and context the style served as a material embodiment of eugenic ideology. With careful analysis and abundant illustrations, Eugenic Design is an ambitious reinterpretation of one of America's most significant and popular design forms, ultimately grappling with the question of how ideology influences design.

A Century of Eugenics in America

A Century of Eugenics in America
Author: Paul A. Lombardo
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2011-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253222699

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.

In Search of Purity

In Search of Purity
Author: Shantella Yolanda Sherman
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2016-08-31
Genre:
ISBN: 9781537422978

"In Search of Purity: Eugenics and Racial Uplift among New Negroes, 1915-1935" is a dissertation that examines the reinterpretation of eugenic theories by Black scholars, who helped integrate the science into a social movement for racial uplift. Areas of analyses include: The Talented Tenth, links between ideas about social degeneracy and physical hygiene, eugenics courses and professors at Howard University, hereditarian, and colorism. Guiding principles of African American-led eugenic theory are examined alongside the fading imagery of the Old Negro that consisted of stereotypes scattered throughout plantation fiction, Blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, and Darwinism. Specifically, terms like germ plasm (negative characteristics transmitted through genes through continual selection, unchanged, from one generation to the next), and racial hygiene (a public health platform designed to eliminate, among other ailments, venereal disease and promote healthy reproduction within a race) are analyzed in their relation to popular discourses about Black cleanliness that included "moral fitness" and intellectual ineptness. Ideologies that intrinsically tied Blackness to social degeneracy and criminality, as well as terms like full-blood and mulatto, are also examined. Links between standards of beauty, desirability, and marriage-worthiness in relation to those ideas are also critiqued. Of particular interest is the impact of racial hygiene discourses on African-American advertising through the promotion of products to lighten skin and straighten hair in order to eliminate noticeable signs of racial inferiority.

Imbeciles

Imbeciles
Author: Adam Seth Cohen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 1594204187

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 New York Times bestselling author Adam Cohen tells the story in Imbeciles of one of the darkest moments in the American legal tradition: the Supreme Court's decision to champion eugenic sterilization for the greater good of the country. In 1927, when the nation was caught up in eugenic fervor, the justices allowed Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, a perfectly normal young woman, for being an "imbecile." It is a story with many villains, from the superintendent of the Dickensian Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded who chose Carrie for sterilization to the former Missouri agriculture professor and Nazi sympathizer who was the nation's leading advocate for eugenic sterilization. But the most troubling actors of all were the eight Supreme Court justices who were in the majority - including William Howard Taft, the former president; Louis Brandeis, the legendary progressive; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., America's most esteemed justice, who wrote the decision urging the nation to embark on a program of mass eugenic sterilization. Exposing this tremendous injustice--which led to the sterilization of 70,000 Americans--Imbeciles overturns cherished myths and reappraises heroic figures in its relentless pursuit of the truth. With the precision of a legal brief and the passion of a front-page exposé, Cohen's Imbeciles is an unquestionable triumph of American legal and social history, an ardent accusation against these acclaimed men and our own optimistic faith in progress.

Eugenics

Eugenics
Author: David J. Galton
Publisher: Little Brown GBR
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2001
Genre: Eugenics
ISBN: 9780349113777

In the continuing media furore over 'designer babies' and the race to complete the map of human DNA - in other words, to identify the individual genes that make us who we are - scientists and commentators rarely use the word that describes this new ethical and technical minefield: 'eugenics'. Since the horrendous experiments of Nazi death camps the word has laboured under a sinister reputation, yet those perverted and racially motivated abominations should not blind us to what eugenics really is: the use of science for the qualitative and quantitative improvement of our genetic constitution. David Galton's superbly clear-headed, sensible and accessible survey of the history, ethics and potential of this much-maligned branch of science makes fascinating reading. From Ancient Greece to Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler and the Human Genome Project, EUGENICS is a brilliant account of our struggle to change the way we are, and where that struggle might take us in the future.

Building a Better Race

Building a Better Race
Author: Wendy Kline
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2005-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520246748

"Building a Better Race powerfully demonstrates the centrality of eugenics during the first half of the twentieth century. Kline persuasively uncovers eugenics' unexpected centrality to modern assumptions about marriage, the family, and morality, even as late as the 1950s. The book is full of surprising connections and stories, and provides crucial new perspectives illuminating the history of eugenics, gender and normative twentieth-century sexuality."—Gail Bederman, author of Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the US, 1880-1917 "A strikingly fresh approach to eugenics.... Kline's work places eugenicists squarely at the center of modern reevaluations of females sexuality, sexual morality in general, changing gender roles, and modernizing family ideology. She insists that eugenic ideas had more power and were less marginal in public discourse than other historians have indicated."—Regina Morantz-Sanchez, author of Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn

Pop-eu

Pop-eu
Author: Dr Shantella Sherman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre: Eugenics
ISBN:

"The term eugenics continues to conjure images of mass genocide or scientists promoting the end of social issues through selective breeding. The American eugenics movement, however, remains formally fused to our everyday lives through popular culture – particularly television and film. While America has set aside terms like moron, imbecile, feebleminded, and idiot, it continues to utilize the policies, laws, and tenets manufactured and embraced during the movement’s heyday to govern. Eugenics also permeates our television shows and films without us being aware through stereotypes, casting, and scripting. Pop-Eu: Popular Eugenics in Television & Film deconstructs some of the bad science we love to watch in the first of a three-volume examination."--Provided by publisher.