HIST J300 American Eugenics
A research guide for students in Prof. Tina Irvine's Spring 2021 American Eugenics class.
Information Overload!!!
The strength and the challenge of IU's history collection is its breadth. Do you feel overwhelmed? Can't find what you're looking for? This guide can help! If you're still having trouble, please let me know! You can also make use of the much larger history research guide linked below.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Many search engines "stem" your search terms, meaning they look for the main part of a word and ignore everything else (e.g. searching "Christianity" will give you results for "Christian"). Consequently, searching "eugenics" will often give you results for anyone named Eugene. Don't get discouraged! Try alternative/related terms.
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Getting Started
The main catalog of books at Indiana University is IUCAT. Watch the video below if you need help finding e-books in IUCAT.
- IUCAT Online Library Catalog This link opens in a new windowThe Indiana University online catalog. Find books, magazines, journals, movies, sound recordings, government publications, digital collections, and more.
See below for some recent histories of eugenics.
Defectives in the Land by
Immigration history has largely focused on the restriction of immigrants by race and ethnicity, overlooking disability as a crucial factor in the crafting of the image of the "undesirable immigrant." Defectives in the Land, Douglas C. Baynton's groundbreaking new look at immigration and disability, aims to change this. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Baynton explains, immigration restriction in the United States was primarily intended to keep people with disabilities--known as "defectives"--out of the country. The list of those included is long: the deaf, blind, epileptic, and mobility impaired; people with curved spines, hernias, flat or club feet, missing limbs, and short limbs; those unusually short or tall; people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities; intersexuals; men of "poor physique" and men diagnosed with "feminism." Not only were disabled individuals excluded, but particular races and nationalities were also identified as undesirable based on their supposed susceptibility to mental, moral, and physical defects. In this transformative book, Baynton argues that early immigration laws were a cohesive whole--a decades-long effort to find an effective method of excluding people considered to be defective. This effort was one aspect of a national culture that was increasingly fixated on competition and efficiency, anxious about physical appearance and difference, and haunted by a fear of hereditary defect and the degeneration of the American race.
Call Number: E-bookISBN: 9780226364162Publication Date: 2016
Eugenic Nation by
Many people assume that eugenics all but disappeared with the fall of Nazism, but as this sweeping history demonstrates, the idea of better breeding had a wide and surprising reach in the United States throughout the twentieth century. With an original emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation brings to light many little-known facts--for example, that one-third of the involuntary sterilizations in this country occurred in California between 1909 and 1979--as it explores the influence of eugenics on phenomena as varied as race-based intelligence tests, school segregation, tropical medicine, the Border Patrol, and the environmental movement. Eugenic Nation begins in the 1900s, when influential California eugenicists molded an extensive agenda of better breeding for the rest of the country. The book traces hereditarian theories of sex and gender to the culture of conformity of the 1950s and moves to the 1960s, arguing that the liberation movements of that decade emerged in part as a challenge to policies and practices informed by eugenics.
Call Number: E-bookISBN: 0520244435Publication Date: 2005
Fixing the Poor by
Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor, Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system. Tracing Minnesota's eugenics program from its conceptual origins in the 1880s to its official end in the 1970s, Ladd-Taylor argues that state sterilization policies reflected a wider variety of worldviews and political agendas than previously understood. She describes how, after 1920, people endorsed sterilization and its alternative, institutionalization, as the best way to aid dependent children without helping the "undeserving" poor. She also sheds new light on how the policy gained acceptance and why coerced sterilizations persisted long after eugenics lost its prestige. In Ladd-Taylor's provocative study, eugenic sterilization appears less like a deliberate effort to improve the gene pool than a complicated but sadly familiar tale of troubled families, fiscal and administrative politics, and deep-felt cultural attitudes about disability, dependency, sexuality, and gender. Drawing on institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers, and professional journals, Ladd-Taylor reconstructs the tragic stories of the welfare-dependent, sexually delinquent, and disabled people who were labeled "feebleminded" and targeted for sterilization. She chronicles the routine operation of Minnesota's three-step policy of eugenic commitment, institutionalization, and sterilization in the 1920s and 1930s and shows how surgery became the "price of freedom" from a state institution. Combining innovative political analysis with a compelling social history of those caught up in Minnesota's welfare system, Fixing the Poor is a powerful reinterpretation of eugenic sterilization.
Call Number: E-bookISBN: 9781421423722Publication Date: 2017
Illiberal Reformers by
The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors but to exclude them.
Call Number: Wells Library - Stacks -- HC105 .L46 2016ISBN: 9780691169590Publication Date: 2016
Imbeciles by
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.
Call Number: Law Library - KF224.B83 C64 2016ISBN: 9781594204180Publication Date: 2016
The Science of Human Perfection by
Almost daily we hear news stories, advertisements, and scientific reports promising that genetic medicine will make us live longer, enable doctors to identify and treat diseases before they harm us, and individualize our medical care. But surprisingly, a century ago eugenicists were making the same promises. This book traces the history of the promises of medical genetics and of the medical dimension of eugenics. While mindful of the benefits of genetic medicine, the book also considers social and ethical issues that cast troublesome shadows over these fields. Keeping his focus on America, Nathaniel Comfort introduces the community of scientists, physicians, and public health workers who have contributed to the development of medical genetics from the nineteenth century to today. He argues that medical genetics is closely related to eugenics, and indeed that the two cannot be fully understood separately. He also carefully examines how the desire to relieve suffering and to improve ourselves genetically, though noble, may be subverted. History makes clear that as patients and consumers we must take ownership of genetic medicine, using it intelligently, knowledgeably, and skeptically.
Call Number: Wells Library - Stacks -- RB155 .C66 2012ISBN: 9780300169911Publication Date: 2012
Sterilized by the State by
This book is the first comprehensive analysis of eugenics in North America focused on the second half of the twentieth century. Based on new research, Randall Hansen and Desmond King show why eugenic sterilization policies persisted after the 1940s in the United States and Canada. Through extensive archival research, King and Hansen show how both superintendents at homes for the 'feebleminded' and pro-sterilization advocates repositioned themselves after 1945 to avoid the taint of Nazi eugenics. Drawing on interviews with victims of sterilization and primary documents, this book traces the post-1940s development of eugenic policy and shows that both eugenic arguments and committed eugenicists informed population, welfare, and birth control policy in postwar America. In providing revisionist histories of the choice movement, the anti-population growth movement, and the Great Society programs, this book contributes to public policy and political and intellectual history.
Call Number: Wells Library - Stacks -- HQ755.5.U5 H36 2013ISBN: 9781107659704Publication Date: 2013
If you are just starting a research project and need to know some basic information to get started, encyclopedias and historical dictionaries are great tools.
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American HistoryDigital research encyclopedia covering American history. Along with essays, it incorporates visual and sound materials and links to original sources. Includes peer-reviewed articles and broad coverage of the field. Some topics feature debates by two or three historians about the most useful ways to understand subjects.
- Oxford Reference LibraryReference resources from the Oxford University Press. Includes English dictionaries and thesauruses, English language reference books, bilingual dictionaries, quotations, maps and illustrations, timelines and subject reference sources.
- Gale eBooksDatabase of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources.
- History Encyclopedias in IUCATThis link takes you to a list of hundreds of encyclopedias that are available as e-books
Most databases allow you click a box with a name like "scholarly articles," which does a reasonably good job of limiting your results to high-quality, academic articles.
- JSTORFull-text of historical runs of important scholarly journals in the humanities, arts, sciences, ecology, and business.
- America: History & LifeBibliographic database focusing on the history and life of the United States and Canada, indexing more than 1,800 journals published, dissertations and reviews.
- Project MuseProvides full text access and indexing for e-journals and e-books from a variety of scholarly publishers. Covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.
- Chronicling AmericaAccess to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages. Search historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
- ProQuest Historical NewspapersDigital archive of historical newspapers. Each issue of each title includes the complete paper, cover-to-cover, with full-page and article images.
- Newspapers.com World CollectionContains full runs and portions of runs of well-known, regional and state titles to small local newspapers in the United States and other countries.
- NewspaperARCHIVEDigital access to more than 1000 historical newspapers from communities within Indiana.
- Archives of Sexuality and GenderIncludes numerous books, manuscripts, and newspaper articles about eugenics, covering the movement in both the United States and other nations.
- Eugenics Periodicals (HathiTrust)HathiTrust (a library of digitized material) holds numerous eugenics journals. Make sure you log-in at the top of the page in order to get the most complete use of the website.
- Eugenics Periodicals (IUCAT)IU owns numerous journals that were important for the eugenics movement. These are just a few of them.
- Nineteenth Century Collections OnlineThis database includes the collection "British Birth Control Material at the British Library of Political and Economic Sciences, 1800–1947," which includes extensive material on eugenics. Since the eugenics movement was international, it could contain useful sources for the study of American eugenics.