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Kevin Joel Berland, Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 574–575, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae196
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As Rachel E. Walker establishes, the practice of judging human character based upon facial or cranial structure was widely established in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American culture. Physiognomy and phrenology served to underwrite hierarchies of race, class, and gender, drawing upon tenets that masqueraded as scientific principles, though lacking empirical foundation. Nonetheless, practitioners insisted that theirs was a true science, employing pseudoscientific language to bolster their pronouncements; the emphasis on scientific classification following Carl Linnaeus may be seen in their classificatory apparatus. In North America, people across many social strata were convinced, finding the supposedly scientific practice useful in numerous ways. Beauty and the Brain illuminates how physiognomy and phrenology were employed to establish privilege by marking and isolating others. Physiognomy reinforced elite views of the varieties of human worth by adducing ostensibly scientific rankings of race and gender, as well as “delimiting the boundaries of political belonging” (p. 18). Thus physiognomy revealed the inherent faults of women, the inferiority of immigrants and working people, the moral and intellectual deficits of “lesser” races—but it could also reveal the markings of republican virtue.
