BiblioVault - Books about Scientific Racism

Bone Rooms

From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums

Samuel J. Redman

Harvard University Press, 2016

A Smithsonian Book of the Year
A Nature Book of the Year

“Provides much-needed foundation of the relationship between museums and Native Americans.”
—Smithsonian

In 1864 a US Army doctor dug up the remains of a Dakota man who had been killed in Minnesota and sent the skeleton to a museum in Washington that was collecting human remains for research. In the “bone rooms” of the Smithsonian, a scientific revolution was unfolding that would change our understanding of the human body, race, and prehistory.

Seeking evidence to support new theories of racial classification, collectors embarked on a global competition to recover the best specimens of skeletons, mummies, and fossils. As the study of these discoveries discredited racial theory, new ideas emerging in the budding field of anthropology displaced race as the main motive for building bone rooms. Today, as a new generation seeks to learn about the indigenous past, momentum is building to return objects of spiritual significance to native peoples.

“A beautifully written, meticulously documented analysis of [this] little-known history.”
—Brian Fagan, Current World Archeology

“How did our museums become great storehouses of human remains? Bone Rooms chases answers…through shifting ideas about race, anatomy, anthropology, and archaeology and helps explain recent ethical standards for the collection and display of human dead.”
—Ann Fabian, author of The Skull Collectors

“Details the nascent views of racial science that evolved in U.S. natural history, anthropological, and medical museums…Redman effectively portrays the remarkable personalities behind [these debates]…pitting the prickly Aleš Hrdlička at the Smithsonian…against ally-turned-rival Franz Boas at the American Museum of Natural History.”
—David Hurst Thomas, Nature

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The Funding of Scientific Racism

Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund

William H. Tucker

University of Illinois Press, 2001

The Pioneer Fund, established in 1937 by Wickliffe Preston Draper, is one of the most controversial nonprofit organizations in the United States. Long suspected of misusing social science to fuel the politics of oppression, the fund has specialized in supporting research that seeks to prove the genetic and intellectual inferiority of blacks while denying its ties to any political agenda.This powerful and provocative volume proves that the Pioneer Fund has indeed been the primary source for scientific racism. Revealing a lengthy history of concerted and clandestine activities and interests, The Funding of Scientific Racism examines for the first time archival correspondence that incriminates the fund's major players, including Draper, recently deceased president Harry F. Weyher, and others.Divulging evidence of the Pioneer Fund's political motivations, William H. Tucker links Draper to a Klansman's crusade to repatriate blacks in the 1930s. Subsequent directors and grantees are implicated in their support of campaigns organized in the 1960s to reverse the Brown decision, prevent passage of the Civil Rights Act, and implement a system of racially segregated private schools.Tucker shows that these and other projects have been officially sponsored by the Pioneer Fund or surreptitiously supervised by its directors. This evidence demonstrates that any results of genuine, scientific value produced with the fund's support have been a salutary, if incidental, consequence of its actual purpose: to provide ammunition for what has essentially been a lobbying campaign to prevent the full participation of blacks in society and the polity.

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Marginal People in Deviant Places

Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism

Janice M. Irvine

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

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A Question of Character

Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912

Catherine Ann Boeckmann

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Boeckmann links character, literary genre, and science, revealing how major literary works both contributed to and disrupted the construction of race in turn-of-the-century America.

In A Question of Character, Cathy Boeckmann establishes a strong link between racial questions and the development of literary traditions at the end of the 19th century in America. This period saw the rise of "scientific racism," which claimed that the races were distinguished not solely by exterior appearance but also by a set of inherited character traits. As Boeckmann explains, this emphasis on character meant that race was not only a thematic concern in the literature of the period but also a generic or formal one as well.

Boeckmann explores the intersections between race and literary history by tracing the language of character through both scientific and literary writing. Nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and physiognomy had a vocabulary for discussing racial character that overlapped conceptually with the conventions for portraying race in literature. Through close readings of novels by Thomas Dixon, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson—each of which deals with a black character "passing" as white—Boeckmann shows how this emphasis on character relates to the shift from romantic and sentimental fiction to realism. Because each of these genres had very specific conventions regarding the representation of character, genres often dictated how races could be depicted.

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