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An “Equal Beard” for “Equal Voting”: Gender and Citizenship in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Redemption

Melissa N. Stein

in Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934

Chapter two describes how racial scientists became invested in defining manhood and to whom it applied. During the Civil War, scientists conducted anthropometric studies of union troops, measuring ... More

Chapter two describes how racial scientists became invested in defining manhood and to whom it applied. During the Civil War, scientists conducted anthropometric studies of union troops, measuring manhood along racial lines. After, they turned their attention from black men's fitness for military service to their fitness for citizenship, a political category attached to men alone.Less

Epilogue

Melissa N. Stein

in Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934

The epilogue discusses the transition in America from viewing race as biological to viewing it as cultural and the continued influence of science and society on racism and racial anthropology.

Scientific Humanism in the Extended Zoo: History Within as the Basis of Democratic Reform

Marianne Sommer

in History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules

Also during his zoo years (1935-1942), Huxley argued for democratic reform in Britain and beyond. He developed the notion that the progress evident in evolutionary history was to be consciously ... More

Also during his zoo years (1935-1942), Huxley argued for democratic reform in Britain and beyond. He developed the notion that the progress evident in evolutionary history was to be consciously prolonged into the future. Scientific analysis and management would further the trends of increasing complexity with concomitant integration and would mean the development of a democratic world society. Huxley, using Lancelot Hogben's and others' knowledge on heritability, demanded that the social environment of people had to be levelled (and levelled up) in order to make genetic potential visible. This was an argument against ‘classical eugenics’ that in the interwar years became a target of Huxley, Hogben, and also J. B. S. Haldane. Within and without scientific institutions they argued against what they understood a misled conception of heredity on which both eugenics as well as racial anthropology were based. The new insights into the heredity process and the knowledge from population genetics made clear that biology was only in harmony with a society of equality of opportunity. In this discourse, a new concept of cultural and biological diversity – one that did not coincide with traditional notions of race or gender – was developed and hyped in the name of scientific humanism.Less

Mapping Miasma, Containing Fear:Richard Burton in West Africa

Jessica Howell

in Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate

Sir Richard Francis Burton’s personal investment in African colonialism, his subscription to certain medical and racial doctrines, and his hostility towards African natives are all interwoven within ... More

Sir Richard Francis Burton’s personal investment in African colonialism, his subscription to certain medical and racial doctrines, and his hostility towards African natives are all interwoven within his travel writing. This chapter traces the arc of Burton’s engagement with the tropical climate and its effects on the white body, from Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851), to The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860) and Wanderings in West Africa (1863). In earlier work, he uses vivid sensory details and detailed first-person descriptions of illness in order to bolster his own heroic persona and also to de-authorise his companions. In later travel writing, Burton creates hygienic maps of West Africa in order to allow space for on-going white settlement at higher elevations. By focusing on concepts of environmental pathology in mid-century travel writing to Africa, one may witness how writers such as Burton attempt to depict and then delimit dangers to the white body.Less