Eugenic Nation
Subtitle: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (American Crossroads)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: August 8, 2005
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 361
ISBN-13: 9780520244443
Subjects: Population & demography; Genetics; Ethnic Studies - General; Ethnic Issues; United States; History: American; USA; History; History / General; Americas (North Central South West Indies); California; Eugenics
First sentence: At a ceremony held in Oregon's capitol building in December 2002, Governor John Kitzhaber stood before an overflowing crowd and apologized for the more than twenty-six hundred sterilizations performed in that state between 1917 and 1983.
Description: 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. --Publisher.