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22) Of better blood
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Teenage polio survivor Rowan Collier is caught in the crossfire of a secret war against "the unfit." It's 1922, and eugenics--the movement dedicated to racial purity and good breeding--has taken hold in America. State laws allow institutions to sterilize minorities, the "feeble-minded," and the poor, while local eugenics councils set up exhibits at county fairs with "fitter family" contests and propaganda. After years of being confined to hospitals,...
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Race, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, an identifiable present, and an uncertain future. The concept of race has been at the center of both triumphs and tragedies in American history and has had a profound effect on the human experience. Race Unmasked revisits the origins of commonly held beliefs about the scientific nature of racial differences, examines the roots of the modern idea of race,...
24) Saving Amelie
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Increasingly wary of her father's genetic research, Rachel Kramer has determined that this trip with him to Germany -- in the summer of 1939 -- will be her last. But a cryptic letter from her estranged friend, begging Rachel for help, changes everything. Married to SS officer Gerhardt Schlick, Kristine sees the dark tides turning and fears her husband views their daughter, Amelie, deaf since birth, as a blight on his Aryan bloodline. Once courted...
25) 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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"American history is full of examples of discrimination in all forms, but never before has the wreckage from America's infatuation with eugenics and its state-sanctioned policy of hate toward the mentally ill been put in such personal terms. In this extraordinary debut book, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Erickson answers the questions that have long haunted an immigrant family: Why was a mother in her early twenties imprisoned and then sterilized?...
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G. K. Chesterton's highly influential treatise on one of the most controversial topics of the early twentieth century. When G. K. Chesterton first published Eugenics and Other Evils in 1922, he seemed to be the lone voice of reason against the fashionable concept of selectively breeding a population for "desirable" traits. Though later generations came to associate eugenics with the horrors of the Third Reich, worldwide support for the philosophy...
29) The gene police
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Eugenics promoted the belief that a race could be improved by controlling who was allowed to mate with whom. It was eugenics that compelled white doctors to attempt to murder Baby John. It was compassion that led to his kidnapping. And it is the cruelest of circumstances--the murder of Jennifer Rice--that fifty years later leads Shep Harrington to search for Baby John. As Shep soon learns, the quest brings him to the top of a slippery slope with...
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Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia's twentieth-century eugenics program was not the misguided initiative of well-meaning men of the day, writes Catte, with clarity and ferocity. It was a manifestation...
31) Goodhouse
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"A bighearted dystopian novel about the corrosive effects of fear and the redemptive power of love by first time novelist Peyton Marshall"--
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In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They...
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"The year is 1911. In Cold Spring Harbour, New York, the newly formed Eugenics Records Office is sending its agents to catalogue the infirm, the insane, and the criminal - with an eye to a cull, for the betterment of all. Near Cracked Wheel, Montana, a terrible illness leaves Jason Thistledown an orphan, stranded in his dead mother's cabin until the spring thaw shows him the true meaning of devastation - and the barest thread of hope. At the edge...
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"Created by Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn program abducted as many as half a million children from across Europe. Through a process called Germanization, they were to become the next generation of the Aryan master race in the second phase of the Final Solution. In the summer of 1942, parents across Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia were required to submit their children to medical checks designed to assess racial purity. One such child, Erika Matko, was...
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Regina was born and raised in the small town of Heridos, where gods and spirits walked the earth. Until they didn't. Ten years ago, the town's harvest failed and the people, believing the gods had abandoned them, left their farms and moved on. Now living in the city, Regina has a strange and disturbing conversation with a new colleague, Diana. Then, mysteriously, Diana disappears. A few days later, Regina finds a folded piece of paper in her bag....
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(Producer) In order to insure the future of the "1000 Year Reich", Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, established the Lebensborn Foundation in 1935. Put simply, its goal was to breed Aryans. In Scandinavia, thousands of women in occupied nations produced Aryan children in Lebensborns. In Poland, up to 200,000 children were taken from orphanages or their parents to be raised as Germans. Most of the German Lebensborn children grew into adulthood...
37) Jewish eugenics
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Eugenics (human ecology) has always understood itself to be part of the struggle for human rights-- those of future generations. John Glad lays out the eugenic thrust of traditional Jewish culture and shows how Zionism itself was conceived as a grand eugenic plan. --From publisher's description.
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Biological races do not exist -- and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today. The...
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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...