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Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America

Online ISBN:
9780226822570
Print ISBN:
9780226822563
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America

Rachel E. Walker
Rachel E. Walker
University of Hartford
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Published online:
18 May 2023
Published in print:
23 November 2022
Online ISBN:
9780226822570
Print ISBN:
9780226822563
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

When America’s founders declared independence from Britain in 1776, they proudly proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” Yet these elite white men faced a troubling conundrum. Despite their professions of egalitarianism, many were determined to maintain racial and gender hierarchies. How, then, did early Americans reconcile their Revolutionary commitment to liberty, justice, and equality with the continued subordination of white women and people of color? Historians have been asking this question for decades, but Beauty and the Brain tackles it through a new lens: the history of popular science. This book recovers the history of physiognomy and phrenology, two disciplines predicated on a deceptively simple premise: that people’s faces and skulls revealed their intelligence, personality, and character. Although now seen as pseudosciences, physiognomy and phrenology once captivated both elite intellectuals and ordinary practitioners. By exposing how early national Americans tried to empirically interpret human minds and bodies, Beauty and the Brain shows how the privileged and powerful invoked the apparent objectivity of science to depict subordinated groups as the natural inferiors of white men. At the same time, this book contends that elite white men were not the only people practicing science in early America. By showing how white women and people of color coopted physiognomy and phrenology for their own political aims, Beauty and the Brain shows how science simultaneously functioned as both a weapon of oppression and a tool of liberation in early American society.

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