Outcasts from evolution : scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 / John S. Haller, Jr.
- Haller, John S., Jr., 1940-
- Date:
- [1971]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Outcasts from evolution : scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 / John S. Haller, Jr. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![viii • Outcasts from Evolution I have tried, within the hmitations that are always present in a work of this nature, to see the nineteenth century's attitudes of race within its own framework—a framework which was much closer to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century concepts of man than to the twentieth century's search for an egalitarian society. It was a century whose racial theories, both liberal and con¬ servative, tended to perpetuate an enduring image masked with assorted variations on the single theme of permanent racial inferiority. This book is a study of the currents of intellectual thought from 1859 to 1900, centering on the development of America's scientific attitudes of race. Marked at one end by the publication of Dai-win's Origin of Species and at the other by the rediscovery of Mendel's law of inheritance in 1900, this work seeks to re-create an internal portrait of anthropology and the application of its ideas in medi¬ cine, psychology, ethnology, and sociology during the so-called 'Ъего1с age of evolutionary-minded synthesizers. The period was important in the development of science in America, for scientific ideas quickly entered the popular culture through the spirited efforts of men like Herbert Spencer, John Fiske, John Wesley Powell, Edward D. Cope, Frederick Hoffman, Joseph LeConte, Nathaniel Shaler, and others who sought to acquaint society with the truths of evolution and the new evolutionary methodology and to apply those truths to the study of man. Many of the men who formulated the period's intellectual ideas not only helped to justify the radical Jeffersonianism of Reconstruction politics but willingly contributed to the disintegration of those ideals in the efforts during the later decades of the century to isolate the Negro through Jim Crow laws and political disfranchisement. What was at once the worst of nineteenth-century America in the sense that we now judge its racial attitudes was also, ironically, the best that American culture had to offer. The sciences, those portions of human knowledge [that] have been more or less gen¬ eralized, systemized, and verified, became the means through which both scientists and social scientists sought to determine the relative value of the races of man, delineate social categories, and](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18025729_0013.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
