The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead by Ann Fabian

The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead



Download The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead




The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead Ann Fabian
Language: English
Page: 283
Format: pdf
ISBN: 0226233480, 9780226233482
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press

From Publishers Weekly

Rutgers dean of humanities Fabian (The Unvarnished Truth) aims to explore "the tension between skull size as measures of racial difference and as markers of common humanity." Unfortunately, while she touches on this fascinating point on numerous occasions, she never fully examines these issues. She provides information about some of "craniology" 's founders, the oddest stories and contradictions, but leaves the reader to synthesize it all. The first half of the book is largely devoted to the work of Samuel George Morton, a 19th-century naturalist who amassed almost 1,000 skulls and used them to argue that there were five distinct races of humans. While Fabian reports on Morton's passion and methodology, and frequently says his work was the basis for the field of "scientific racism," she doesn't allow readers to get inside Morton's head to understand his perspective. Fabian writes most eloquently about the post–Civil War national dissonance, when the government was working aggressively to bury the war dead, while also promoting the unearthing of Native American graves so skulls could be collected for "scientific" use. However, by presenting more anecdotes than insights, Fabian will leave readers unsatisfied and searching for the big picture. 30 illus.
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Review

“Ann Fabian’s latest book is fascinating, astonishingly original, and supplies significant implications for our understanding of life and death in America—among other things.  Brain capacity leads to issues of intelligence, and we all know where that leads. The subject is both curious and compelling—American studies and cultural history at its best.”—Michael Kammen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of People of Paradox

  (Michael Kammen )



 “Ann Fabian''s The Skull Collectors has all the elements of great history: genuine surprises, originality, imaginative research, and marvelous storytelling. Even more importantly, it is a brilliant, disturbing story about the fateful convergence of science and racism in the nineteenth century. Samuel George Morton''s famous skulls, and the quest by so many others to find, steal, measure, and collect so many varieties of ‘heads’ tells us much about the roots of modern racism as well as about why ‘we’ still struggle to define ourselves as one species. Fabian shows us how the dead have always been our teachers, but what we learn depends on the questions we ask.”—David W. Blight, Yale author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped from Slavery, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation



(David W. Blight )

“A haunting voyage through the peculiar—and peculiarly American—world of human skull collecting. Ann Fabian''s remarkable and moving study illuminates as few other works have the powerful hold that the dead and their remains continue to have upon the living.”—Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History

(Karl Jacoby )

“Fabian provides the reader a firm understanding of the history of American physical anthropology during the nineteenth century, serving as an excellent reminder of how far methodologies have come since then. . . . This volume is an excellent contribution to growing literature in the early physical anthropological praxis.”—American Indian Quarterly

(American Indian Quarterly )

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