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A new history of the scientific inquiry into race
The attempt to define the concept of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is often described as a corrupt "pseudo-science," but in this strikingly original account, Geoffrey Galt Harpham describes the inquiry into race as a serious scientific project undertaken by some of the leading figures of the time. In a "skeletal history" of this project, Harpham tracks the rise and fall of racial science, focusing on the central role played by craniology, or the study of skulls, in key debates in Germany, the United States, and France.
Emerging at the end of the eighteenth century as a way of thinking about human variation, the concept of race became entangled in an extraordinarily wide range of scientific, philosophical, theological, and political debates about issues ranging from the place of humanity in the natural world to the rationales for colonization and slavery. But at the end of the nineteenth century, a...