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Full-text articles to support research in history and genealogy and lesson plans to support student learning.
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"A history of the class system in America from the colonial era to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the underprivileged white demographic, citing the pivotal contributions of lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy, and the rise of the Republican Party"--NoveList.
3) The orphans of Davenport: eugenics, the Great Depression, and the war over children's intelligence
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"The fascinating-and eerily timely-tale of the forgotten Depression-era psychologists who overthrew long-accepted racist and classist views of childhood development. "Doomed from birth" was how psychologist Harold Skeels described two toddler girls at the Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa, in 1934. Following prevailing eugenic beliefs, Skeels and his colleague Marie Skodak assumed that the girls had inherited their parents' low intelligence and sent...
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This documentary reveals how biologically determined politics has disenfranchised women and people of color, provided a rationale for state sanctioned crimes committed against America's most vulnerable citizens, and now gains new traction under the Trump administration. A radical reassessment of the meaning, use and misuse of gene science. Like no other film before it, this documentary brings to light how false scientific claims have rolled back long...
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Presents the story of the eugenics movement in the U.S., tracing its evolution from a force for human progress through the study of genetics to an anti-humanistic campaign for state-sponsored sterilization and the closing of the country's borders to peoples believed by some to be genetically inferior.
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Immigration history has largely focused on the restriction of immigrants by race and ethnicity, overlooking disability as a crucial factor in the crafting of the image of the "undesirable immigrant." Defectives in the Land, Douglas C. Baynton's groundbreaking new look at immigration and disability, aims to change this.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Baynton explains, immigration restriction in the United States was primarily...
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"The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America's schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In this innovative book, Michael E. Staub investigates neuropsychological studies published between Brown and the controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve. In doing so, he illuminates how we came to view race and intelligence today"--
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In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity,...
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""My body, my choice!" used to be the rallying cry of the left in the abortion fight. But now this same principle of bodily autonomy is the central argument of conservatives, such as that of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in fierce opposition to so-called "vaccine passports," which would limit whether an individual could attend movies or other public events, work, or even go to school, if they chose to decline a COVID-19 vaccine. While cities like...
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Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor, Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system. Tracing Minnesota's eugenics program from its conceptual origins in the 1880s to its official...