This sort of discrimination and even dehumanization was already widespread, but, in Europe and its colonies, a few key differences lead to a unique analysis. Firstly, the concept of race was not consistently connected to heritability in Europe until the sixteenth century. Before then, it was generally assumed that traits like skin color were determ

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In a tragic coda to this early story of eugenics, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was still enmeshed in the controversy over eugenics as recently as January 2019, this time through the disgraceful racist utterances of Nobel laureate James D. Watson, cofounder of the DNA double helix and one of the laboratory’s longtime fellows, whom they stripped of

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Excluding Natives from the census was symbolically significant, sustaining the fantasy that settlers were taming an uninhabited wilderness. But statistically, it was less important. In 1890 those page-963 Indians and Alaskans made up only 0.57 percent of the population, the consequence of the dwindling of Native populations and the explosion of Ang

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