Yale and Eugenics: A Dive into the Archives
Yakeleen Almazan & Isabella Morales
In Fall of 2023, the students of the Eugenics and Its Afterlives course in the History of Science and Medicine Department at Yale worked on a collective project to make some of the eugenics archives at Yale more accessible. Yale University’s libraries are home to a huge number of archival documents directly related to the eugenic knowledge production and advocacy of the American Eugenics Society. Some of the archives are accessible to the public, but most of the documents are difficult to parse through. Furthermore, the archives are organized by people, rather than by subjects, so connecting folders of eugenics-related documents in the archive of one eugenicist to another is difficult. One more burden of entry to looking through the archives is that there is an institutional indifference to Yale’s connections to eugenics — so the professors, scientists, researchers, and Yale administration who were also eugenicists are not remembered for their ties to eugenics, making it difficult to figure out who in the large archival collection at Yale is relevant when unearthing the history of eugenics.
To work against the barriers enumerated above, students in the course each took responsibility for finding two archival documents related to eugenics, and then annotated each section of the document so that it is easily understandable for someone without an expansive background in the history of eugenics. Students took time to define various terms thrown around by eugenicists, identify people named in the documents and their ties to eugenics, and contextualize the documents within a broader history. After the students had individually annotated their documents, they came together and conducted a peer review to point out where annotations were unclear or could be bolstered.
Two students in the class, Yakeleen Almazan ‘25 and Isabella Morales ‘24 took on the task of compiling and standardizing all of these annotated documents into one booklet that clearly outlines the history of eugenics, its popular figures, and breaks down the ideas that persist today. They worked to organize the annotated documents by subject and person, added section dividers with more detailed histories of eugenicists and their impacts, and also took time to standardize the style of each annotated document so that they are much easier to access and comprehend.
View their booklet below!