Annotated Research Guide
This page contains a guide for materials for reading, watching, and viewing. The resources are sorted by discipline and topic, and are intended to serve as a jumping-off point for research and other types of engagement.**
The importance of looking at contemporary fields and disciplines lies in thinking about how eugenic discourse about hierarchy and human value shaped and continues to influence knowledge production at a foundational level. Recognizing this, we can begin to challenge fundamental assumptions and reimagine our fields under an anti-eugenics lens.
**Note: We believe all kinds of knowledge production can be valuable and generative, beyond only institutional scholarship in the form of journal articles. This resource guide includes public writing, news articles, multimedia, podcast episodes, archival work, primary sources, and scholarship.
An annotated guide to contemporary and historical representations and criticisms of eugenics.
Statistics
•
Gender and Sexuality
•
Disability
•
Incarceration and Institutionalization
•
Reproductive Justice
•
Indigenous and Anti-colonial Contestations
•
Child Development
•
Education
•
Genomics and Natural Sciences
•
Music and Creative Arts
•
Statistics • Gender and Sexuality • Disability • Incarceration and Institutionalization • Reproductive Justice • Indigenous and Anti-colonial Contestations • Child Development • Education • Genomics and Natural Sciences • Music and Creative Arts •
Race science, carceral logics, and hierarchical thinking did not disappear after the American Eugenics Movement ended.
These sources bring together varied perspectives on both the historical and contemporary moments so we can interrupt continuities and ensure that we are not reproducing eugenic logics in ongoing modes of knowledge production.
Linking Past, Present, and Future
On this page
Use this menu to navigate to your section of interest.
1- Linking Past, Present, and Future
2- Table of Contents
__________
3- Statistics
5- Incarceration and Institutionalization
6- Forced Sterilization and Reproductive Justice
7- Indigenous and Anti-colonial Contestations
8- Child Development, Intelligence, and Education
9- Genomics and the Natural Sciences
10- Music and the Creative Arts
11- The Progressive Era and Liberal Thinking
12- 1921 Second International Congress of Eugenics
__________
13- Eugenics at Yale
How Eugenics Shaped Statistics by Aubrey Clayton. Nautlius. (magazine article)
In this article in Nautilus magazine, Aubrey Clayton shows how the field of statistics was pioneered by people such as Francis Galton, an influential eugenicist who established statistical principles like correlation, and the idea of normal distributions in relation to human intelligence. The importance of attending to these histories is exemplified by the success of New York Times bestselling book The Bell Curve (1994) by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, which echoed much of Galton’s work. Indeed Sam Harris, a podcaster with millions of listeners, invited Charles Murray as a guest on his podcast as recently as 2017. Understanding how these ideologies became normalized in popular media and assumed knowledge helps us to identify, expose, and disrupt sites of eugenic thought.
White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology by Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Rowman & Littlefield. (book)
This book examines how racial considerations have affected the way social science is conducted; how issues are framed, and data is analyzed. It is a crucial guide for researchers and academics who want to use data in an anti-eugenic way.
“Legal Equality, Gay Numbers and the (After?)Math of Eugenics” by Dean Spade and Rori Rohlfs. S&F Online. (journal article)
Statistics have been mobilized in the fight for queer rights and equality under a liberal democratic framework. The authors argue that "the explosion of new empirical data about gay and lesbian or LGBT people is not discovering the truth about an existing population; rather, it is formulating that population in order to frame it as a “deserving” population in the contexts of US racial norms." This method, they argue, does little to challenge or expose the interlocked systems of oppression that face LGBT people beyond their ability to access recognition under a state-based framework. The authors draw on Foucault’s notion of biopower and state power to conclude that these state-based intentions operate under a “specific concern with normalizing the population” which, linking to the eugenic histories of statistics, “relies heavily on the collection and analysis of standardized data, statistics, and statistical measure as a feature of biopolitics. Identifying and sorting the population and the environment in order to identify risks, threats, and drains becomes a central preoccupation of this kind of power.” What does it mean for groups of people to be transfigured into statistics for legal and political ends?
Statistics
“Imagine What We’ll Build for One Another”: an Interview with Jules Gill-Peterson. The New Inquiry. (interview transcription)
Author of Histories of the Transgender Child and trans of color scholar Jules Gill-Peterson discusses contemporary state efforts to strip trans people of agency, safety and rights in healthcare, education, sports, and public spaces. She explains these new laws as reinvigorated forms of “eugenics policymaking”, that is, “a policy that dictates what kinds of life are acceptable, which should be promoted, and which should be subject to what abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment,” in which the state makes itself through policing, surveillance, and denial of the resources people need to survive.”
Binary Logic by Beans Velocci. (book)
Stay tuned for this groundbreaking book, in which trans scholar Beans Velocci uses mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century case studies to show that the power to sort bodies by sex emerged not from solidified, agreed-upon parameters, or inherent bodily forms, but out of a mobile and malleable understanding of sex that enabled scientists to redefine their terms of classification at every turn. It also makes visible the constant categorical work required to make it appear that most humans and non-humans easily fit into binary male and female categories. The book uses five case studies to look at the processes of sorting and classifying bodies within this chaotic category of sex that was constantly shifting: (1) zoology, (2) eugenics, (3) gynecology, (4) statistical analyses of sex behavior, and (5) early trans medicine. Tracing the connections between race, sex, white supremacy and eugenics offers crucial historical background for what is unfolding today. As Dr. Velocci writes: “Knowledge making about sex that hides its illogical behind the authority of supposedly objective scientific expertise is an ongoing source of administrative violence against queer and trans people.”
“Did Home Economics Empower Women?” by Margaret Talbot. The New Yorker. (magazine article)
The seemingly innocuous but deeply gendered field of home economics, it turns out, is implicated with eugenic ideologies as well, once again revealing the ways sex and race were co-constituted. The founders were “drawn to eugenics, and saw home economics as a way to stem the “race degeneration” of white Americans.”
“Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body” by Siobhan Somerville. (journal article)
Scientific racism is an ideology that mutually motivates eugenics, attributing racial inequalities as biologically essential rather than created by structural violence. This text from 1994 deals with the concepts and history of scientific racism as it relates to homosexuality, that is, how “the classification of bodies as either “homosexual” or “heterosexual” emerged at the same time that the United States was aggressively policing the imaginary boundary between “black” and “white” bodies.” (245) Somerville focuses on the racist and eugenic logics of 19th Century sexology, discussing “how discourses of race and gender buttressed one another…in shaping emerging models of homosexuality.”
Gender and Sexuality
Incarceration and Institutionalization
States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California's Juvenile Justice System (2012) by Miroslava Chávez-García (book)
[Note: Miroslava Chavez-Garcia is one of the figures organizing The California Eugenic Legacies Project, alongside Alexandra Minna Stern, Wendy Kline, and others. This group acknowledges the explicit eugenic acts of the state with regards to forced sterilizations while creating space for discussion of how eugenics logics are perpetuated today.]
This book focuses on the rise of the juvenile justice system in California and its treatment of young people of color through active processes of radicalization, criminalization, and pathologization. Chávez-García shows how, in doing so, understandings of biological and racial difference were used to develop a system of race-based typologies used to infer subnormal or low intelligence. She also preserves stories of everyday resistance to the carceral logics and abuse.
American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (2003) by Nancy Ordover (book)
American Eugenics posits a critique of enduring biological arguments of race, sexuality, and reproduction— while taking us through concepts like the “gay gene” and breaking down their scientific appeal. Ordover says this on the persistence of eugenic logics: the “long-lasting appeal of eugenics has rested on its protection of the status quo, on its emphasis on individual and group ‘failings’ over analyses of systemic culprits, and on its bedrock insistence on scientific/technological remedies over fundamental social and institutional change.”
“Eugenics, Euthanasia and Eudemonia: Connecticut Valley Hospital Source Analysis,” (2021) by Eve Galanis (essay)
This essay analyzes histories of institutional confinement and Eugenics in Connecticut by looking at the Connecticut General Hospital for the Insane (now known as Connecticut Valley Hospital). Galanis draws out the connection between forms of domination over bodies— from carceral to medical settings.
“LGBTQ+ Mental Health Treatment in the 20th Century,” (2022) by Eve Galanis (essay)
This article follows how the mid-20th-century witnessed the pathologization of gender and sexual identities as deviant ‘sex cases’ in the context of health care. Sexual and gender identities that deviated from heterosexual/cisgender would be regarded as mental illnesses. With compassionate care and empathy in the contemporary age, we are encouraged to think about whether our frames of thinking about things like gender dysphoria reify any of the same underlying logics of deviance / normality.
Forced Sterilization and Reproductive Justice
No Más Bebés (2015, Renee Tajima-Peña, Virginia Espino). (film)
This documentary centers on the landmark reproductive justice case, Madrigal vs Quilligan. This case follows the experiences of a multitude of Mexican immigrant mothers who were coercively sterilized in the 1960s and 1970s at Los Angeles County- USC Medical Center. Their stories ground a sense of reproductive justice in a more expansive sense, which also encompasses the right to bear a child.
"Mexican Americans and eugenic sterilization: Resisting reproductive injustice in California, 1920–1950," (2014) by Natalie Lira, and Alexandra Minna Stern. (journal article)
Lira and Stern’s intervention into the study of eugenics and forced sterilizations includes shedding light on how California eugenicists viewed the Mexican-origin population as “the state’s foremost ‘racial problem.’” (15)
California's Sterilization Survivors: An Estimate and Call for Redress. (2017) by Stern AM, Novak NL, Lira N, O'Connor K, Harlow S, Kardia S. (journal article)
Stern and others seek to use available records to estimate statistics on the documented survivors, which is how they were able to estimate 831 survivors were still alive as of 2016. Due to its aggressive history and extremely high number of survivors, the authors think California should pay reparations to survivors and produce a sterilization registry to locate these living individuals. While California made a public apology in 2003, the authors and many others feel that is not enough given their significant contribution to the sterilizations in the US, ongoing sterilization in California women’s prisons.
"The U.S. bears International Responsibility for Forced Sterilization of Women in ICE Detention." (2020) by Reinsberg and Paoletti. (news article)
In 2020, a complaint was filed against Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC), a private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Georgia, because a gynecologist the facility contracted was found to have performed an alarming number of hysterectomies on immigrant women without their consent. States have an obligation to respect and protect immigrant detainees, and their failure to regulate third parties acting at the request of the State, such as the owner of ICDC, LaSalle Corrections, is a violation of international human rights law.
Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and US Imperialism in Puerto Rico by Laura Briggs. (book)
In Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, historian Laura Briggs argues that ideologies of family, sexuality, and reproduction animated U.S. imperial and racial projects in the colony of Puerto Rico. She traces this history from the subjugation of the prostitute, “seductive but brimming with disease,” to the “impoverished, overlarge family,” to overpopulation. The behavior of women living in poverty, in particular, was “defined by its deviance.”
SisterSong definition of Reproductive Justice:
“SisterSong defines Reproductive Justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
SisterSong’s mission reflects an understanding of access and care that expands conceptions of bodily autonomy beyond the right to an abortion. Learn more about their framework here and in WHAT BOOCK CITES THEM.
Indigenous & Anti-Colonial Contestations
Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (2013) by Kim TallBear
In Native American DNA, scholar Kim TallBear demonstrates how Indigenous claims to land, resources, and sovereignty may be seriously undermined by the rise of DNA testing. TallBear’s critique focuses on how the language regarding DNA testing can reduce what it means to be Indigenous to genetically determined characteristics. She defends the ethics of Indigenous jurisdiction over their own identities — collective traditions that focus on relationships, and shared value systems negotiated by social relations.
“Use ancient remains more wisely.” (2019) by Keolu Fox and John Hawks (article)
This brief and accessible article describes the fine balance between the recent, rapid scale in DNA analysis and the need to safeguard the cultural remains from which analysis is done. The authors cautions us against the “impetuous anxiety for discovery” and the “relentless pressure to publish” in scientific practices.
"Informing Red Power and Transforming the Second Wave: Native American women and the struggle against coerced sterilization in the 1970s." (2016) by Meg Devlin O'Sullivan. (article,965-982)
In the 1970s, Indigenous women’s activism highlighted coerced sterilization in their communities as the most agonizing example of compromised tribal sovereignty. This article describes the the tangible achievements of Indigenous women in effecting federal regulations for the termination of sterilization abuse in 1970s USA.
Amá (mother) (2019) by L Tucker, & G Doherty (film)
Amá is a feature length documentary film that features the testimony of three Native American women who endured involuntary sterilization and forced removal from their traditional lands at the hands of the United State Government during the 1960s and 1970s.
Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania by Maile Arvin. Duke University Press. (book)
Specifically, see the chapter, Conditionally Caucasian: Polynesian Racial Classification in Early Twentieth-Century Eugenics and Physical Anthropology. “Arvin brings fresh light and new depth to the scholarship on racial discourse, eugenics, and colonialism through a study of how they operated in Hawai‘i.” - David A. Chang.
Inner angles: A range of ethical responses to/with indigenous/decolonizing theories by Eve Tuck and Michelle Fine. (book chapter)
These theorizers argue that indigenous sovereignty to be taken seriously as a prerequisite to democracy and decolonization must be a common project on multiple social justice agendas.
Child Development, Intelligence, and Education
The Orphans of Davenport: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War over Children's Intelligence (2021) by Marilyn Brookwood (book)
Chapter 4: “From a Dog You Do Not Get a Cat.”
Brookward discusses how psychologist Lewis Terman played a pivotal role in developing the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, in popularizing the field of psychology, and in infiltrating psychology with eugenic ideals. Adhering to eugenic thought, the purpose of this test was to improve society by identifying, institutionalizing, and sterilizing people with “low intelligence.” As Brookwood points out, intelligence tests “reinforce[d] a caste system” that placed those who “lacked the means, connections, or skin color to become well educated and well employed” at the bottom (72). Thus, while IQ tests were believed to be an objective measure of intelligence, the results revealed the vast social inequities that existed in society. This history is important in understanding the inability to measure “intelligence” objectively, which calls into question society’s current ways of doing so, such as through standardized testing.
Eugenics, Race, and Intelligence in Education (2007) by Clyde Chitty (book)
Chapter 7: “The Durability of Eugenics Theories” and “Epilogue: Prospects for the Future.”
Chapter 7 digs into the ways in which eugenical theories of intelligence and education have persisted in the UK and US since the 1990s. Chitty discusses the frightening 1994 publication The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, where authors Murray and Herrnstein write that different racial groups have different, “genetically determined” (114) intelligence capacities. Chitty looks towards historian Steven Selden to narrate a persistence, rather than a disappearance, of eugenics throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Then he discusses the impact of eugenic conceptions of intelligence on education policy in the UK. The epilogue thinks about future possibilities for anti-eugenics work in education spaces, considering the Cambridge research project Learning without Limits which identified and studied nine teachers who “had rejected ideas of fixed innate ability” (126).
“The Racism of Intelligence: How Mental Testing Practices Have Constituted an Institutionalized Form of Group Domination.” by Jean-Claude Croizet, in The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship, 1865-Present (article)
Croizet’s primary claim in “The Racism of Intelligence” is that a “[r]eliance on standardized testing, far from being the technology that would allow the construction of a more meritocratic society, contributes actively to the legitimization and reproduction of inequality” (38). To describe the negative impact of standardized testing on non-dominant groups, Croizet details the history of intelligence testing in education from Simon-Binet intelligence tests, to evolutions in IQ testing, and to the use of intelligence tests in legal battles over segregation. Croizet also explains the inconsistencies in data throughout the outlined history as well as the inconsistent pairing or decoupling of race and intelligence, depending on the social context of the time.
“Quest for 'Genius Babies'?” (2013) by Colleen Flaherty (news article)
Flaherty discusses how despite recent public disapproval of scientific research linking race and intelligence, researchers led by physicist Stephen Hsu of Michigan State are currently leading the way for cognitive genomics based genetic engineering. Based in the “world’s biggest genomics sequencing lab in Shenzhen, China”, Hsu’s team is working to identify alleles coding for human intelligence, which has audiences speculating over the reasons driving such work. While Hsu defends his research, arguing that there is no stopping science and the role that genetic engineering will play in a future near us, critics question both the validity of this work, as well as the intentions and implications that this could hold on humanity at large.
Genomics and the Natural Sciences
Genomics, Race, and Ancestry
Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (2015) by Michael Yudell (book)
“Race in the Genomic Era” and “Epilogue.”
Yudell presents an accessible discussion about race and population genetics, and the way that race is claimed as a methodologically sound classificatory tool in the biological sciences. He proposes that defining race on a study by study basis may be a way to simultaneously embrace the inconsistencies of the race concept and find meaning in its specific context.
“Taking Race Out of Population Genetics” (2016) by Yudell et al ()
Yudell further discusses the use of the race concept in population genetics research. He recommends the use of terms like ancestry or population to describe human grouping, but can these avoid racial connotations and assumptions? He posits that phasing out racial terminology would send an important message to scientists - historical racial categories that are treated as natural and infused with notions of superiority and inferiority have no place in biology.
Gene editing and Eugenics
“CRISPR: What is the future of gene editing” by Al Jazeera (interview)
This interview with CGS Program Director on Genetic Justice, Katie Hasson, serves as an introduction to gene editing and CRISPR. The question is posed, What is the future of gene editing? CRISPR allows scientists to “perform surgery on our genes.” How is the technology transforming lives, and how should it? CRISPR has unleashed a whole new era of genetic engineering with implications for what human characteristics are seen as faulty or valuable.
“If You Could Design Your Baby’s Genes, Would You?” (2015) by Daniel Kevles (magazine article)
Kevles, a historian of science, provides an overview of the relationship between Eugenics and gene editing. How can this “enormously powerful” molecular tool enable us to engineer new kinds of people and enforce the idea of genetic destinies? “Examining why the dream of human biological improvement foundered in the past may help us understand why it may gain support in the future.”
“Eugenics: Historical Practice to Present Day Technology.” (2021?) by Joseph Stramondo (article)
Dr. Stramondo, of San Diego State University, writes on advanced reproductive technologies (ARTs) in the context of disability rights. “While few members of polite society would now openly endorse the coercive eugenics of this earlier time,” disabled people still confront eugenic logics of value and burden in exercising their reproductive autonomy.
“Can 'Eugenics' be Defended?” (2021) by Veit, Singer, Anomaly, Agar, Minerva, Fleischmann (journal article)
Explores how the term ‘Eugenics’ has been deployed in debates about gene editing and CRISPR.
Legacies of Eugenics in New England Conference: "Scientific Endeavours at Harvard" (2021) Conversation between Natalie Koefler and Angela Saini (conference session, video)
[Starts at 1:06:30 and ends at 1:36:00]
This conversation between Natalie Koefler, molecular biologist with the Harvard Scientific Citizenship Initiative, and Angela Saini, author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, covers the relationship between gene editing, genomics research, and the continuity of Eugenic ideas in contemporary life science research. It is centered around contemporary scientific endeavours at Harvard.
Music and the Creative Arts
"Destined to Fail": Carl Seashore’s World of Eugenics, Psychology, Education, and Music (2021) by Julia Eklund Koza, (book).
Chapter 6: “Making Musical Destinies: Talent, Testing, and Music Education Reform” (263-336)
This book explores American psychologist Carl E. Seashore’s little-known adherence to eugenic ideology in his frameworks surrounding musical talent as biological ability and standardized testing. On musical talent: he promoted a “systematic process of identifying ability, measuring it in individuals or groups, sorting and ordering them, and finally selectively promoting or eliminating them.”
“The Warp and the Weft of the Wealth of Yale” by Bhasha Chakrabarti (MFA dissertation paper)
Chakrabarti, a graduate of the MFA program at Yale, writes on the initial textile donation which created the wealth that Yale’s academic dominance was built upon. In doing so, she leads readers through thinking about the ancestry of institutions and what kinds of labor and power dynamics go un-noticed and unrecognized in the public record.
The Progressive Era and Liberal Thinking
Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. (2015) by Thomas Leonard. (book)
Chapters 1, 2, 3
Leonard interrogates and problematizes the role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of American liberalism. He thinks through how the state viewed the poor both as victims and threats requiring restraint. “The progressive vision of how to govern scientifically under industrial capitalism lives on.”
“A Humanist View.” (1975) by Toni Morrison. (Speech delivered at Portland State University)
Listen to Morrison deliver the speech here (starts at 7:15 and listen through 43:15).
1921 Second International Congress of Eugenics
"Eugenics" (1916) by Franz Boas (article, archived).
Anthropologist Franz Boas wrote an important 1916 critique of Eugenics research, providing us with a crucial early-20th-century anti-eugenic perspective. To Boas, “it is perfectly safe to say that no amount of eugenic selection will overcome those social conditions by means of which we have raised a poverty and disease-stricken proletariat […] so long as the social conditions persist that remorselessly push human beings into helpless and hopeless misery.” Boas underscored the role of social factors in producing inequality, arguing that “Eugenics is not a panacea that will cure human ills, it is rather a dangerous sword that may turn its edge against those who rely on its strength.”
“The Eugenics Movement in Retrospect.” (2022) by Rob DeSalle (article).
This is a contemporary discussion of the Museum of Natural History’s role in the Eugenics movement by Rob DeSalle, Curator in Molecular Systematics at the AMNH. He discusses the structure of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, its aims, the figures involved, and the role of the educational and exhibition prowess of the AMNH in the public’s perception of the Congress.
"The second international Congress of Eugenics address of Welcome." (1921) by Henry Osborn (public address, archived).
To begin the scientific portion of the Congress, Henry Fairfield Osborn delivered a welcoming address to ignite a sense of urgency around eugenics: "I doubt if there has ever been a moment in the world's history when an international conference on race character and betterment has been more important than the present." Osborn was president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and a cofounder of the American Eugenics Society.
“The second International Exhibition of Eugenics held September 22 to October 22, 1921, in connection with the Second International Congress of Eugenics in the American Museum of Natural History.” (1923) by Harry Laughlin (account of the exhibition, archived)
This account provides detailed descriptions and images of the Congress where leading scientists, anthropologists, statisticians, government officials, and fellow eugenicists gathered to present 131 exhibits to “bear upon the biological factors in family and racial fortunes.” These exhibits displayed pedigrees, graphs, charts, and diagrams for thousands of viewers to appreciate the importance of heredity in creating both value and danger in society. This source includes images of all the exhibits, ranging from “Eugenical Classification of the Human Stock” to “The Chromosomes of Man” to “Measurement of Mental Traits” and even “Heredity of Musical Ability.”
“The second international congress of eugenics.” (1922) by CC Little (article, archived)
Clarence Cook Little’s defense of the eugenics program responded to critiques about the faddism and sensationalism of eugenics, as well as its shaky scientific foundations. He strived for the Congress to eradicate all notions that eugenics was “impractical” or a “gigantic joke.” Readers should think about the ways in which eugenicists responded to criticism and intentionally tried to build legitimacy through institutional connections. Little describes that in order “To meet these criticisms an effort to build a strong programme for the Congress in genetics and in anthropology was made.”
Eugenics at Yale
"Breed out the Unfit and Breed in the Fit’: Irving Fisher, Economics, and the Science of Heredity.”(2005) by Annie L. Cot (journal article)
This paper addresses the question of nature of capital and interest and how it is linked to eugenic assumptions and analysis through three major themes: the constant denunciation of a "racial decay" of the American population and its corollary: the project of setting up a "scientific humaniculture"; the plea against the eugenic effects of World War I, and the then haunting question of the closing of the "Golden Door".
"Measuring "Problems of Human Behavior": The Eugenic Origins of Yale's Institute of Psychology, 1921-1929" (2014) by John Doyle (Yale senior thesis)
This senior thesis won the MSSA Kaplan Prize for Yale History.
“The Darkest Aura and Its Reach: The Embedded Culture of Yale’s Eugenics” in Fearless: A Bartlett Giamatti and the Battle for Fairness in America (2020) by Neil Thomas Proto (book)
Proto writes on Yale University’s first non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant president, about the embedded culture of Yale’s eugenics and the “‘elect’ mentality that tempered Yale from the outset” (45).