Chapter

Legacies of Slavery in Scholarship: Race Science

By 1850, Harvard Medical School had become a focal point of scientific theories and practices rooted in racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and discrimination at the University. That same year, as we have seen, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, requiring the return of enslaved people to their owners even if slaves had escaped to free states, turned more white Northerners against slavery and its cruelties. Yet support for antislavery efforts remained anemic at Harvard, even amid the rise of abolitionist sentiment in the Commonwealth. Indeed, at Harvard Medical School, the forces of conformity with the racial status quo, aided by Harvard presidents and leading Harvard faculty members, prevailed against those who dissented.

Harvard Medical School Dean Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was at the helm during an 1850 controversy over the abortive admission of the Medical School’s first three Black students, and his views on race help contextualize this episode.⁠Go to footnote 740 detail They also shed light on the group of hugely influential Harvard faculty members whose work in so-called “race science”—the study of racial differences that emphasized the superiority of whites and inferiority of African peoples—would legitimize racist views among generations of scientists, medical researchers, and indeed political leaders. An alumnus of Harvard College (1829) and Harvard Medical School (1836), Holmes was a prominent anatomist and a prolific poet when he became dean in 1847.⁠Go to footnote 380 detail Among his friends and colleagues were the race science proponents Jeffries Wyman and Louis Agassiz, also hired in 1847 as the University worked to grow its ranks of prominent scientists in the 19th century.⁠Go to footnote 381 detail Holmes, like many scientists of the time, held similar views to Wyman and Agassiz. Holmes at times promoted the idea of innate differences in moral character, health, and intelligence among races.⁠Go to footnote 382 detail He also defined “the Brahmin caste of New England” to describe himself and his peers, distinguishing between “the common country-boy, whose race has been bred to bodily labor” and the “races of scholars,” like himself, who “take to [their] books as a pointer or a setter to his field-work.”⁠Go to footnote 383 detail In an Atlantic Monthly essay published in April 1875, Holmes cited, among others, Francis Galton, an English scientist known as the father of eugenics,⁠Go to footnote 384 detail asserting that “in most cases, crime can be shown to run in the blood.”⁠Go to footnote 385 detail

Such ideas were perhaps related to Holmes’s engagement with anatomical racial difference.⁠Go to footnote 386 detail During the 19th century, Harvard had begun to amass human anatomical specimens, some of which were the bodies of enslaved people. Holmes was among the scientists who donated human remains to the Warren Anatomical Museum, including a skull (apparently from Africa): “The obliteration of the cranial sutures that characterize the African is finely shown,” he explained.⁠Go to footnote 387 detail Such racialized collections would, in the hands of the University’s prominent medical and scientific authorities, become central to the promotion of race science at Harvard and many American institutions, as discussed in greater detail below.

During his tenure as dean of the Medical School, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. supported the admission of three Black students in 1850. When faced with protest from some white students, however, Holmes and the faculty determined to exclude the three Black students, writing “the intermixing of different races, on a footing of equality and personal proximity during the course of Lectures, is distasteful to a large portion of the class, and injurious to the interests of the School.” HUP Holmes, Oliver Wendell, AB 1829 (3), olvwork594981, Harvard University Archives

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Black Students at Harvard Medical School

On November 2, 1850, Holmes met with Medical School faculty members to consider an inquiry about the admission of two Black students, Daniel Laing Jr. and Isaac H. Snowden, who were well qualified and had the support of members of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which advocated for the removal of free Black Americans to Africa.⁠Go to footnote 388 detail The day before, Abraham R. Thompson and Joseph Tracy, the former a Medical School alumnus (1826) and both members of the ACS Board of Directors, had written to the Medical School faculty endorsing Laing and Snowden as “two young men of colour, pursuing medical studies … for the purpose of practicing in the Republic of Liberia in Africa, where their services are greatly needed.”⁠Go to footnote 389 detail The faculty voted to admit.⁠Go to footnote 390 detail

Not long thereafter, a third Black applicant sought admission on his own initiative. Martin Robison Delany, who was already a prominent abolitionist, writer, and speaker, visited Dean Holmes in person.Although Delany was not supported by the ACS like Laing and Snowden, he too had the prerequisite medical training, and 17 white doctors from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, had endorsed his application. Holmes extended an offer of admission.⁠Go to footnote 391 detail

Already a prominent abolitionist, writer, and speaker when he was admitted to and then expelled from Harvard Medical School in 1850, Martin Robison Delany went on to recruit thousands of Black soldiers to serve in the Union Army, and to be commissioned a major himself. Abraham Bogardus, “Major Martin Robison Delany” (1865)/National Park Service, Gettysburg National Military Park

Laing, Snowden, and Delany would, however, have a tumultuous and extremely brief tenure at the Medical School. Their reversal of fortune started when 10 white students signed a petition asking to be “informed whether colored persons [were] to be admitted as students at another course of lectures.”⁠Go to footnote 392 detail Other resolutions followed. On December 10, 1850, some 60 of Laing, Snowden, and Delany’s 116 white colleagues met and, by a slim majority, voted to endorse a resolution stating that the admission of Black students would degrade the quality of their degrees. The signers refused to “be identified as fellow-students, with blacks; whose company we would not keep in the streets, and whose society as associates we would not tolerate in our houses.”⁠Go to footnote 393 detail

The opposition to the Black students was not universal. Another group of students drafted a competing resolution on December 11, cautioning the University against rescinding admission to the three Black students: “As students of science … they would feel it a far greater evil, if, in the present state of public feeling, a medical college in Boston could refuse to this unfortunate class any privileges of education, which it is in the power of the profession to bestow.”⁠Go to footnote 394 detail

Nevertheless, Holmes and the faculty determined to exclude the three Black students, deeming them irritants and distractions to the educational environment. In a letter to the sponsors of Laing and Snowden, Holmes and the faculty described this episode as a failed “experiment,” which had proved that “the intermixing of different races, on a footing of equality and personal proximity during the course of Lectures, is distasteful to a large portion of the class, and injurious to the interests of the School.”⁠Go to footnote 395 detail

Race Scientists: Louis Agassiz, John Collins Warren, and Jeffries Wyman

This episode took place in the context of the growth of race science at Harvard, which provided an intellectual framework to justify the exclusion and marginalization of Blacks that would endure into the 20th century. Along with Holmes, those engaging with racial difference at Harvard included John Collins Warren (AB 1797; dean, 1816–1819; faculty, 1809–1856), the son of one of the Medical School’s cofounders and himself the first dean of the faculty of medicine, and Holmes’s contemporaries Jeffries Wyman (faculty, 1838–1840 and 1847–1874) and Louis Agassiz (hon. 1848; faculty, 1847–1873). No one was as influential in this area as the renowned Swiss-born scientist Agassiz, yet each of these men—Warren, Wyman, and Agassiz—left powerful legacies on Harvard’s campus and in the wider world.

John Collins Warren, the first dean of Harvard Medical School and a cofounder of Massachusetts General Hospital, donated his and his father’s vast collections of “pathological and other specimens” to Harvard, including human skulls. Those specimens became the foundation of the Warren Anatomical Collection, today a part of the Countway Library of Medicine. Center for the History of Medicine Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine/Harvard Medical School

When Sturmann, a 17-year-old African boy, committed suicide after more than six months on exhibition, Harvard Professor Jeffries Wyman dissected his body. Sturmann’s remains were entered into the Warren Anatomical Collection at Harvard Medical School. HUD 258.704.1 (seq. 135), Harvard University Archives

Louis Agassiz came to Harvard in 1847 as a professor of zoology and geology in the Lawrence Scientific School. While his primary interest lay in the classification of animal species, Agassiz, a popular public intellectual, became one of foremost proponents of race science in the United States and argued that Blacks were at the bottom of a racial hierarchy ordained in nature. HUP Agassiz, Louis (16a), olvwork360592, Harvard University Archives

Agassiz and Wyman both joined Harvard at a time of institution-building, Agassiz at the new Lawrence Scientific School and Wyman, like Holmes, at the Medical School.⁠Go to footnote 396 detail Wyman succeeded Warren as a professor of anatomy, but Warren remained active in the University until his death in 1856. These three men, as colleagues and collaborators, were instrumental in the creation of major Harvard institutions.

The Warren Anatomical Museum, now housed within Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library, was established when Warren donated his and his father’s vast collections of “pathological and other specimens” to Harvard, including human skulls and “phrenological” casts.⁠Go to footnote 397 detail Wyman led the creation of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where he served as inaugural curator. And Agassiz established and served as the first curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology.⁠Go to footnote 398 detail

The Warren Anatomical Museum, seen here in the early 20th century, is one of the last surviving anatomy and pathology museums in the United States. During the 19th- and early 20th- century, the museum’s specimens served as an important teaching tool at Harvard Medical School. Leroy Edward Parkins, The Harvard Medical School and Its Clinical Opportunities (Boston, MA: Press of R. W. Hadley, 1916)

The Agassiz name remains visible across Harvard’s campus and the City of Cambridge. Louis, who served as professor of zoology and geology from 1847 to 1873 and as curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology from its founding in 1862 until 1873,⁠Go to footnote 399 detail is the most well-known member of the Agassiz family. Yet the memorials that remain are generally named for his wife, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (for instance a professorship, a gate in Radcliffe Yard, and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz House, home of the Harvard College Admissions Visitor Center), or for his son, Alexander Agassiz (namesake of Harvard professorships).

Elizabeth is credited as coauthor of A Journey in Brazil (1868), a travelogue about their yearlong scientific expedition in the country, discussed below.⁠Go to footnote 400 detail She also left her own powerful mark at Harvard: in 1879, she was among a group of reformers who founded the Harvard Annex, where women could receive instruction from Harvard faculty. The Annex was soon incorporated as the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, and in 1894, it was chartered as Radcliffe College. Elizabeth served as the first president of Radcliffe College and was a pioneering leader in the history of women’s education.⁠Go to footnote 401 detail Alexander, an engineer and investor in copper mining as well as a scholar of natural history, also worked closely with his father. He handled much of Louis’s correspondence in the final years of his life and succeeded Louis as curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1874.⁠Go to footnote 402 detail Alexander donated substantial sums to several organizations in the final years of his life, including more than $200,000 to the museum to support research, publications, and the professorships that still bear his name.⁠Go to footnote 403 detail

Agassiz’s Early Career and the Zealy Daguerreotypes

Louis Agassiz’s journey to Harvard began when he was invited to deliver the Lowell Institute’s Lowell Lectures.⁠Go to footnote 404 detail While the institute was not affiliated with Harvard, it was a forum that attracted many esteemed Harvard affiliates as lecturers and guests. Agassiz’s 1845 invitation came on the recommendation of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to secure funding for Agassiz’s Atlantic crossing through his position as an advisor to the king of Prussia.⁠Go to footnote 405 detail Agassiz was by then a prominent naturalist, known in Europe’s scientific circles for his work on glaciation and the classification of ancient fish species.⁠Go to footnote 406 detail In this work, he was part of a movement toward classifying flora and fauna according to geographic origin, building upon Carl Linnaeus’s universal system of classification.⁠Go to footnote 407 detail Naturalists of the era were known for their splendid depictions of nature and often went on scientific expeditions in the Americas to collect specimens for their research. Their preoccupation with nature also extended to the classification of humans “into a single natural hierarchy of difference and similarity,” organized under the rubric of race.⁠Go to footnote 408 detail

The field of anthropology emerged in this context to study diversity among human groups as a function of visible racial difference.⁠Go to footnote 409 detail Medical scientists contributed to the field’s growth by investigating relationships among racial typology, geography, and disease. Phrenology, which related the shape and size of the cranium to intellectual and moral faculties, became a popular racial scientific field; craniometry, the measurement and dissection of human skulls, was its primary method. By the 19th century, race science had become a global enterprise,⁠Go to footnote 410 detail and Agassiz was fully immersed when he arrived in the United States in the fall of 1846.

Among the first things Agassiz did in America was to view the prominent anatomist Samuel George Morton’s skull collection in Philadelphia,⁠Go to footnote 411 detail an early stop on his tour of the scientific community in the United States, which warmly embraced him.⁠Go to footnote 412 detail Agassiz spent “four hours in contemplation” of the skulls of Native Americans and received a personal copy of Morton’s Crania Americana, inscribed by the author. In a letter to his mother, Agassiz wrote that Morton’s “collection alone merits a trip to the United States.”⁠Go to footnote 413 detail He also reflected on his first encounter with African Americans:⁠Go to footnote 414 detail “It is impossible for me to repress the feeling that they are not the same blood as us.”⁠Go to footnote 415 detail

At this time, the United States was on the verge of establishing its own scientific institutions and schools of thought independent from those of Europe. Polygenism—which proposed not only a hierarchy of races but also separate creations of different races—was “an important agent in this transformation” because it was “of largely American origin” yet acquired authority from European scientists who had long pursued scientific theories of racial difference themselves.⁠Go to footnote 416 detail Agassiz understood the importance of this moment in the nation’s intellectual life and saw an opportunity. Some two years later, now a member of the Harvard faculty and building a celebrity status matched by few other scientists, he declared to the Boston Society of Natural History that American scientists “had been obliged to look up to Europe as our leader and guide in this pursuit,” but “a short period of persevering labor … would place America in the position hitherto occupied by the Old World.”⁠Go to footnote 417 detail

Agassiz’s wide-ranging specimen collections were a celebrated part of life and learning at Harvard. In 1859, he presented his entire collection to the University. Agassiz in study, unknown, 1870/Schlesinger Library

Agassiz first formally articulated his embrace of polygenism at an 1850 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Charleston, South Carolina.⁠Go to footnote 418 detail In an essay published soon thereafter, he set out to disprove the “prevailing opinion, which ascribes to all living beings upon earth one common centre of origin, from which it is supposed they, in the course of time, spread over wider and wider areas, till they finally came into their present distribution.”⁠Go to footnote 419 detail His primary objective was “to show that there is no such statement in the book of Genesis: that this doctrine … is of very modern invention, and that it can be traced back for scarcely more than a century in the records of our science.”⁠Go to footnote 420 detail In another essay, he concluded that Blacks were at the bottom of a racial hierarchy ordained in nature and contended that “there has never been a regulated society of black men developed” in Africa, suggesting a “peculiar apathy … to the advantages afforded by civilized society.”⁠Go to footnote 421 detail

Such views were controversial even then. The first half of the 19th century represented a period of hardening of race as a scientific concept in the United States, at the height of debate over “monogenesis” versus “polygenesis,” or the single versus separate origins of races.⁠Go to footnote 422 detail Monogenists, who believed in a single human creation, immediately criticized Agassiz’s arguments. Writing to her then fiancé, Elizabeth Cary noted the opposition building to his ideas: “Some of the Church people are out upon you in the papers, for your disrespect of Adam as the common father of mankind.”⁠Go to footnote 423 detail Congress was also, at this time, debating the Fugitive Slave Act, the passage of which would galvanize antislavery sentiment in New England.⁠Go to footnote 424 detail Agassiz flatly denied that his research had bearing on the fraught political question of slavery,⁠Go to footnote 425 detail although he asserted that it was “mock-philanthropy and mock-philosophy to assume that all races have the same abilities, enjoy the same powers, and show the same natural dispositions, and that in consequence of this equality they are entitled to the same position in human society.”⁠Go to footnote 426 detail

Agassiz was celebrated in the South, where he was invited to the homes of prominent slaveholders and gave iterations of his 1850 AAAS lecture.⁠Go to footnote 427 detail Some of these visits were arranged by a local paleontologist and physician who welcomed Agassiz to plantations in Columbia, South Carolina, to examine enslaved Africans as live research specimens. Following Agassiz’s examination, Joseph T. Zealy made daguerreotype images of seven men and women for Agassiz’s further study: Delia, Jack, Renty, Drana, Jem, Alfred, and Fassena.⁠Go to footnote 428 detail In so doing, Zealy created what the New York Times described in 2020 as “some of history’s cruelest, most contentious images—the first photographs, it is believed, of enslaved human beings.”⁠Go to footnote 429 detail

It was more than a century before historians retraced the identities and origins of the individuals represented in Agassiz’s daguerreotypes. We now know that Delia, Renty’s daughter, was an enslaved girl from Columbia, and that Jack was Drana’s father. Fassena, noted in the daguerreotype as a carpenter, was Mandingo, originally from modern southern Mali and Northern Guinea. They are each pictured nude or nearly so.⁠Go to footnote 430 detail

Agassiz returned to the South in 1851–1852 with his new wife, Elizabeth, who would become his frequent collaborator. The collection of research specimens—including human specimens—remained his focus.⁠Go to footnote 431 detail In an 1852 letter, he begged pardon for his delayed arrival at his next destination, explaining that he “found … an excellent opportunity of examining the negros, of which I must avail myself.”⁠Go to footnote 432 detail

Agassiz’s wide-ranging specimen collections were a celebrated part of life and learning at Harvard. In an 1850 report to the overseers, University President Jared Sparks highlighted Agassiz’s, Wyman’s, and the University’s collections. Some of these were on display in Holden Chapel, used by the Medical School as a lecture hall and then assigned to the new Lawrence Scientific School, including a “curious collection of casts of skulls … which was purchased and presented to the University several years ago.”⁠Go to footnote 433 detail

Wyman, Agassiz, and Sturmann

In September of 1860, “an extraordinary importation from South Africa” arrived in Boston—five human beings described as “a Fuigo, a Zulu, a Kaffir, a Bushman, and a Hottentot, all sons of the forests and the desert who have hitherto lived the life of savages.”⁠Go to footnote 434 detail These living “specimens,” had been acquired by the owners of the Boston Aquarial and Zoological Gardens for public exhibition. The announcement promised a one-of-a-kind experience, “seeing these specimens of human nature in a savage condition just as they appear in their native forests and wilds”—including “monkey tricks.” Their names were given as Machiado, Macormo, Macuolo, Quaggu, and Sturmann.⁠Go to footnote 435 detail

Advertisements described how the museum space was divided into two departments: the aquarial and the zoological.⁠Go to footnote 436 detail The Africans were to be displayed alongside an assortment of “rare and beautiful animals and birds” including seals, kangaroos, and “Serpents.”⁠Go to footnote 437 detail “[R]efined and intellectual” ticketholders were promised performances of savagery on a regular schedule:

They will appear through the day, CLAD IN THEIR NATIVE DRESSES OF SKINS, ORNAMENTED WITH BEADS, FEATHERS AND PORCUPINE QUILLS, and every evening will go through the WAR, LOVE and FESTIVE DANCES,—(armed with their SPEARS, CLUBS, SHELLS, AND OTHER WEAPONS OF WAR AND OF THE CHASE,) and will also SING the NATIONAL SONGS of their SEVERAL TRIBES.⁠Go to footnote 438 detail

In 1860 and 1861, Agassiz lent his scientific credibility to the exhibition of a group of five Africans displayed at museums in Boston and New York. While on exhibit, the Africans were required to perform stereotypes of savagery. TCS 65 (Box 319), Houghton Library, Harvard University

The museum’s owners created a scholarly veneer by commissioning a detailed pamphlet purporting to describe “the early life of each individual specimen of the nomadic tribes.”⁠Go to footnote 439 detail And Agassiz lent his scientific authority to the proceedings, addressing an inaugural gala on October 4, 1860.⁠Go to footnote 440 detail

Three months later, when the popular showman P. T. Barnum exhibited the Africans in New York City, public outcry over the questionable nature of their “importation” prompted him to print a statement from Agassiz in local newspapers. Agassiz “testified” that they were not enslaved but “were shipped with the knowledge and consent of the local authorities,” and that “nothing was done in securing them that would be objectionable either in a moral point of view or with reference to the laws of nations.”⁠Go to footnote 441 detail He did not identify these “local authorities,” nor did he address the consent of Machiado, Macormo, Macuolo, Quaggu, and Sturmann themselves.

One of the five, Sturmann, took his own life on April 28, 1861, after more than six months on display.⁠Go to footnote 442 detail The Boston Evening Transcript announced his death in a brief editorial:

The young Hottentot at the Aquarial Gardens, yesterday terminated his life by hanging. He was seventeen years of age and used to drive a wagon at Port Natal. For several days he was noticed to act strangely, and, just before the commission of the fatal act, conveyed from the room, where he and his four companions domesticated, nearly every moveable article, in accordance with the practice of all suicides among his people. The other Africans at the Gardens are deeply affected by the death of their companion.⁠Go to footnote 443 detail

Regardless of their distress, Machiado, Macormo, Macuolo, and Quaggu were “again on exhibition” on April 30.⁠Go to footnote 444 detail

Sturmann’s time as an object of study in the service of race science was only beginning: Wyman, who had met Sturmann while he was on display, dissected the teenager’s body at Harvard, ultimately publishing his observations in an 1865 issue of the journal the Anthropological Review.⁠Go to footnote 445 detail He took extensive measurements and compared them to those of a chimpanzee, a gorilla, and two Europeans. In a protracted discussion of Sturmann’s pelvis, he noted that in some respects it came “nearer to that of the anthropoids [apes] than of the Caucasians”⁠Go to footnote 446 detail but concluded it “belonged to the human family.”⁠Go to footnote 447 detail

Ultimately, Sturmann’s remains were recorded in the catalog of the Warren Anatomical Museum:

Item # 3237 cast of the head of a native Hottentot. The boy was seventeen years old, had been on exhibition for several months in this city; and finally hung himself. His skeleton is in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, at Cambridge, 1861.⁠Go to footnote 448 detail

The casts of Sturmann’s head remain in Harvard’s collections.

Global Collecting and the Brazil Expedition

Over nearly three decades, Agassiz also engaged colleagues across the United States and around the world, especially in the Caribbean and Latin America, to collect and classify the natural world for what would become the Museum of Comparative Zoology.⁠Go to footnote 449 detail He instructed his collectors—including patrons, friends, readers, and lecture audiences—to send him animals of all kinds from across New England, the United States, and the world.⁠Go to footnote 450 detail His aim was to endow the United States with a museum that would rival the best collections in Europe. Agassiz initially acquired and stored most of the collection at his own cost, raising funds to support the effort from private donors, including Elizabeth Cary Agassiz’s connections among the Boston elite.⁠Go to footnote 451 detail

The search for specimens motivated Agassiz to organize his expedition to Brazil in 1865, in the midst of the Civil War. Polygenist ideas were losing favor following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, and Agassiz identified Brazil as a prime location to continue his research and defend his claims.⁠Go to footnote 452 detail In April 1865, with the support of a Boston financier,⁠Go to footnote 453 detail Agassiz left for Brazil accompanied by Elizabeth and several Harvard students—including William James,⁠Go to footnote 454 detail who would become an influential Harvard psychologist. Meanwhile Alexander Agassiz, now a naturalist in his own right and directly involved in his father’s work, assumed responsibility for the museum and handled Louis’s correspondence, including discussions of the procurement of human remains from South America.⁠Go to footnote 455 detail

Because of the country’s racial diversity and its significant mixed-race population, Brazil had particular significance for Agassiz and other natural scientists of the 19th century.⁠Go to footnote 456 detail In fact, race scientists had long identified Brazil as the embodiment of the dangers of race mixture, which they argued had produced a population that doomed the nation to backwardness.⁠Go to footnote 457 detail Race mixture was Agassiz’s focus when he commissioned a new set of photographs of Brazilian enslaved and free people. Agassiz personally oversaw the production of these images, which were taken by a local photographer and a Harvard student assistant.⁠Go to footnote 458 detail The photographs likely were staged in the courtyard of the house in Brazil where Louis and Elizabeth had at one point resided with the research crew.⁠Go to footnote 459 detail

Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis’s wife and frequent collaborator, left her own mark on the University as the cofounder and first president of Radcliffe College. Best remembered for her role as a pioneer in women’s education, her legacy is complicated by her involvement in her husband’s work. Portrait of Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz/Schlesinger Library

Louis and Elizabeth cowrote A Journey in Brazil, published in 1868, which documented the expedition and presented their findings to a general audience in the travel narrative genre of the time. In the book’s preface, Louis specifically acknowledged the important role his wife played in the endeavor:

Partly for the entertainment of her friends, partly with the idea that I might make some use of it in knitting together the scientific reports of my journey by a thread of narrative, Mrs. Agassiz began this diary. I soon fell into the habit of giving her daily the more general results of my scientific observations, knowing that she would allow nothing to be lost which was worth preserving.⁠Go to footnote 460 detail

Elizabeth’s own correspondence confirms her deep involvement in writing and editing the manuscript.⁠Go to footnote 461 detail Given this, it is interesting to note that the book remains silent about the Brazil photographs, even as it provides detailed depictions of other episodes, including Louis’s sketch of their house maid. Elizabeth is also thought to have expunged from other publications Louis’s most flagrantly racist views.⁠Go to footnote 462 detail

It is unclear whether the omission of the photographs reflects Elizabeth’s discomfort with Louis’s production of the images, all nude or seminude, her effort to safeguard Louis’s reputation, or some other motivation. Whatever the reason, these omissions underscore Elizabeth’s active participation in the expedition and publication. It is also evident from her work on A Journey in Brazil that she accepted prevailing racial hierarchies and stereotypes. For example, one passage in the book describes a gathering of enslaved people that Elizabeth and the crew witnessed while Louis was elsewhere:

The dance and the song had, like the amusements of the negroes in all lands, an endless monotonous repetition. Looking at their half-naked figures and unintelligent faces, the question arose, so constantly suggested when we come in contact with this race, “What will they do with this great gift of freedom?”The only corrective for the half doubt is to consider the whites side by side with them: whatever one may think of the condition of slavery for the blacks, there can be no question as to its evil effects on their masters.⁠Go to footnote 463 detail

Both Louis and Elizabeth were also interested in educational reform, so it is not surprising that they took time to observe the state of education across Brazil in the course of their travels. In one striking passage, they connect the deficits they perceive in Brazilians’ education with the close contact between enslavers and the enslaved in private homes:

Behind all defects in methods of instruction, there lies a fault of domestic education, to be lamented throughout Brazil. This is the constant association with black servants, and, worse still, with negro children. … Whether the low and vicious habits of the negroes are the result of slavery or not, they cannot be denied; and it is singular to see persons, otherwise careful and conscientious about their children, allowing them to live in the constant companionship of their blacks. … It shows how blind we may become, by custom, to the most palpable dangers.⁠Go to footnote 464 detail

A complicated figure in her own right, some 11 years after the publication of A Journey in Brazil—and 6 years after her husband’s death—Elizabeth played a critically important role in promoting educational access for women through the Harvard Annex, later Radcliffe College. Notably, and notwithstanding the racial prejudices she entertained while working alongside Louis in Brazil, Radcliffe College admitted and graduated Alberta Virginia Scott, its first black alumna, as part of its first graduating class in 1898, during Elizabeth’s tenure as president (1882–1899).⁠Go to footnote 465 detail

Charles William Eliot: A Paradoxical Racial Legacy

Charles William Eliot, Harvard’s longest-serving president, in office for the four decades from 1869 to 1909, was an influential national figure. According to one historian, “by the turn of the century … his opinion and support were sought on every variety of public question.”⁠Go to footnote 466 detail He and his presidential administration represent a paradox: Harvard began admitting small numbers of Black students during his presidency; at the same time, Eliot himself and prominent Harvard faculty members promoted eugenics and endorsed racial segregation.

The first African Americans to earn Harvard degrees did so during Charles William Eliot’s long presidency. At the same time, he promoted racial segregation, stating publicly, “In the case of the negroes and the whites, the races should be kept apart in every respect. The South has a wise policy.” Sidney Lawton Smith, "Charles William Eliot," 1904/Harvard Law School Library, Historical & Special Collections

The first Black students to graduate from Harvard did so just two months after Eliot’s election to the presidency.⁠Go to footnote 467 detail The University saw its first Black graduate of the College, Richard T. Greener (AB 1870); first Black commencement orator, Robert H. Terrell (AB 1884); first Black class day speaker, Clement Morgan (AB 1890); and first Black recipient of a PhD, W. E. B. Du Bois (AB 1890; MA 1891; PhD 1895), during this period. Moreover, during Eliot’s administration, William Monroe Trotter (AB 1895; AM 1896) became the first Black member of Phi Beta Kappa and Alain Locke the first Black Rhodes Scholar (1907).⁠Go to footnote 468 detail Eliot’s tenure also saw the hiring of Harvard’s first Black faculty member, George F. Grant.⁠Go to footnote 469 detail

Perhaps the most significant development occurred soon after Eliot became president, and it revealed the paradox at the heart of limited Black advancement at Harvard during his presidency. In 1896, Harvard awarded an honorary degree to a Black man for the very first time: Eliot bestowed the honor upon Booker T. Washington,⁠Go to footnote 470 detail a man who had been born in slavery and who had made a mark as an author and as the principal of the Tuskegee Institute (later the Tuskegee College and today Tuskegee University).⁠Go to footnote 471 detail By awarding Washington an honorary degree, Harvard expressed esteem for a Black man of great ability, and that was no small thing. But that was not all the award to Washington signified: it was a politically significant choice that gave Harvard’s imprimatur to a man who achieved fame by urging Blacks to accommodate rather than fight racial exclusion, discrimination, and segregation.

Just months before Harvard honored him, Washington had gained national renown through his “Atlanta Compromise” address. In this 1895 speech, made to an audience of white Southerners during a time of rising white violence, political backlash, and legalized discrimination against descendants of slavery, Washington argued that Blacks should not agitate for racial equality or challenge segregation. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” he said.⁠Go to footnote 472 detail Instead of pursuing the “extremest folly” of social equality, Blacks should pursue vocational education and work hard in the South, including manual labor in cotton mills.⁠Go to footnote 473 detail Washington’s proposal amounted to a “conservative social Darwinist proposition,” according to one biographer, and it delighted whites who were eager to leave the race question behind and let Blacks fend for themselves. Washington’s “compromise” enraged Black leaders bent on fighting racial inequality.⁠Go to footnote 474 detail (In 1903, the Harvard graduate W. E. B. Du Bois would famously critique Washington’s views in The Souls of Black Folk.⁠Go to footnote 475 detail)

Harvard President Charles William Eliot (far right) bestowed an honorary degree on Booker T. Washington (front row, third from left), the principal of the Tuskegee Institute who achieved fame by urging Blacks to accommodate rather than fight racial exclusion, discrimination, and segregation. Underwood & Underwood, "Booker Washington and some of his distinguished guests," 1906/Library of Congress

It was in this context—Washington’s endorsement of Black political quiescence—that Eliot personally awarded the honorary degree to him (and 12 others) during a June 24, 1896, ceremony in Sanders Theatre. Eliot praised Washington’s remarks that evening at an alumni dinner, in which Washington—a self-described “humble representative” of the Black South—commended the “strong,” “wealthy,” and “learned” of Harvard and exhorted them to help the “ignorant” and “weak” masses rise to the “American standard.”⁠Go to footnote 476 detail

But Harvard did relatively little to help Blacks rise during Eliot’s long presidency. Instead, Eliot himself, and Harvard’s leadership more broadly, continued to advance ideas premised on biological racial difference—the same ideas deployed to support racial segregation. Eliot supported faculty who pursued eugenics, the selective breeding of human beings premised on racial hierarchy, and after his presidency would become a prominent public advocate for the field.⁠Go to footnote 477 detail His views were “well within the intellectual mainstream” at Harvard and throughout the country at the time,⁠Go to footnote 478 detail and coexisted with his enthusiasm for applied science as a means to identify new solutions for long-standing social ills. These interests were not merely academic; Eliot’s views were also bound up with his politics—including his endorsement of segregation, opposition to interracial marriage, and support for eugenic sterilization—and shaped his administration of the University.

The Bussey Institution, founded in 1871 as an undergraduate department in agriculture with the proceeds of Boston merchant Benjamin Bussey’s bequest to the University,⁠Go to footnote 479 detail was reestablished under Eliot as a graduate school of applied biology.⁠Go to footnote 480 detail Eliot supported the new school and its faculty, clearing the way for the geneticist William E. Castle’s research into “what principles underlie the improvement of breeds” and his hereditary experiments on small mammals.⁠Go to footnote 481 detail Castle and his ties to the global eugenicist movement are discussed in greater detail below.

Another beneficiary of Eliot’s support was Dudley Allen Sargent, assistant professor of physical training (1879–1889) and director of Hemenway Gymnasium (1879–1919).⁠Go to footnote 482 detail As head of Hemenway, Sargent established a system of rigorous physical exercises through which students might reform their bodies into the archetypal healthy, civilized man. He also, as described by Eliot, subjected “all students who desired to take part in athletic sports or severe physical exercises” to “thorough physical examination.”⁠Go to footnote 483 detail These intrusive physical examinations and his approach to physical education were motivated by his interest in “race improvement.”⁠Go to footnote 484 detail

Student athletes subject to Sargent’s anthropometric evaluation began with a genealogical and family health form, which included parents’ and grandparents’ nationalities and parents’ occupations, as well as a question about which parent the students believed they “most resemble[d].” After completing the form, the students’ physical proportions were measured and plotted in a detailed chart that showed “relation, in size, strength, symmetry, and development, to the normal standard of your age and sex.”⁠Go to footnote 485 detail As part of these examinations, Sargent took nude photographs of many students, among them a young W. E. B. Du Bois.⁠Go to footnote 486 detail He also measured and photographed students at Radcliffe and other colleges and universities, as well as men and women at gymnasiums and community organizations, such as YMCAs and YWCAs, and at major public events, including the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.⁠Go to footnote 487 detail

Sargent used his data to establish normative and idealized measurements for both sexes and commissioned drawings and sculptures to illustrate these findings.⁠Go to footnote 488 detail Like other prominent eugenicists of the period, he was preoccupied with the notion that the white race was deteriorating under conditions of modernity and believed that as nations became more advanced, their citizens became unfit and lax.⁠Go to footnote 489 detail He also openly endorsed racial hierarchy and held that “civilized” or “superior” races could be distinguished from “primitive” or “inferior” races based on body proportions.⁠Go to footnote 490 detail

incomplete anthropometric evaluation record with input fields: date; age; weight, height (of knees, sitting, pubes, navel, and sternum); girth (of head, neck, chest, repose, full, waist, hips, thighs, knees, calves, insteps, upper arms, elbows, forearms, and wrists), breadth (of head, neck, shoulders, waist, hips, and nipples); depth (of chest and abdomen); length (of shoulder to elbow, elbow tip, feet, and horizontal); stretch (of arms); capacity (of lungs); strength (of lungs, back, legs, chest, upper arm, forearm, and total); development; pilosity; color of hair and eyes; and temperament

Graph with title "Anthropometric Chart."

sculptures of Sargent's typical American male and female form

Close up of Myron's Discobolus sculpture of a man preparing to throw a discus.

Sargent’s anthropometric evaluation of students began with a genealogical and family health form, on which students were required to list parents’ and grandparents’ nationalities and parents’ occupations, as well as which parent the students believed they “most resemble[d].” He also took detailed anthropometric measurements. Records of the Department of Physical Education: anthropometric measurements of Harvard students, 1860–1920, Harvard University Archives

Sargent and his staff measured students’ physical proportions and plotted them on a detailed chart that showed “relation, in size, strength, symmetry, and development, to the normal standard of your age and sex.” Records of the Department of Physical Education: anthropometric measurements of Harvard students, 1860–1920/Papers of Dudley Allen Sargent: oversized items, HUG 1768, Harvard University Archives

Sargent used his data to establish normative and idealized measurements for both sexes and commissioned drawings and sculptures to illustrate these findings. He displayed a pair of such sculptures, “The Typical American Male and Female,” at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and later at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Dudley Allen Sargent’s “Typical American Male and Female” statues, on display in the Hall of Anthropology at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology/93-1-10/100264.1.1, Harvard University

A replica of Myron’s Discobolus, donated to the University and standing in front of Hemenway Gymnasium since 1908, is a reminder on campus today of Sargent’s vision of human physical perfection. Rose Lincoln/Harvard University

Eliot was also active in the public sphere, where he touted race science and the virtues of segregation. In the spring of 1909, before stepping down as president,⁠Go to footnote 491 detail Eliot made a tour of the American South, where he was frequently asked to comment on questions of race. While in Memphis, Eliot attempted to address “race problems” in an interview with local reporters.⁠Go to footnote 492 detail The resulting article spread like wildfire, with newspapers across the country, including in Boston, reprinting his statement that “there should be no admixture of racial stock”:

I believe for example, that the Irish should not intermarry with the Americans of English descent; that the Germans should not marry the Italians; that the Jews should not marry the French. Each race should maintain its own individuality. The experience of civilization shows that racial stocks are never mixed with profit, and that such unions do not bring forth the best and strongest children. … In the case of the negroes and the whites, the races should be kept apart in every respect. The South has a wise policy. I believe that Booker T. Washington has the right ideals and that Dubois is injuring the progress of his race with his views.⁠Go to footnote 493 detail

Other newspapers quoted from the same interview Eliot’s comparison of the South to other parts of the United States:

In the South it is the negro problem. The same or similar problems exist in all parts of the country. In protestant Massachusetts, the land of Pilgrims and Puritans, the population today is mostly Catholic. There are Irish, Italian, and Portuguese that present the same race problem to that part of the country that the negroes do to the South. On the Pacific coast it is the same with the Japanese.⁠Go to footnote 494 detail

Following public criticism of these comments, Eliot engaged in damage control; he acknowledged the value of immigrants and attempted to clarify his views on assimilation—namely that it should be gradual rather than sudden and achieved through education, industry, and policy rather than intermarriage. But he did not deny an aversion to racial mixing. While it was common in this era to oppose marriage between races of “widely different characteristics,”⁠Go to footnote 495 detail Eliot had gone further, drawing lines between Europeans. One political cartoon depicted a stern Professor Eliot trying to instill his “no admixture” message in his only student—a laughing cupid.⁠Go to footnote 496 detail

His statements did not go unnoticed by those few Black members of the Harvard community. A month after the interview, in April 1909, William Monroe Trotter wrote to Eliot “as an alumnus of Harvard, as a colored man, and as editor of a newspaper for colored Americans.” Trotter, who cofounded the Niagara Movement, predecessor of the NAACP, with W. E. B. Du Bois, wanted to know if what he was reading in the press was true—whether the president of his alma mater really advocated “total segregation,” approved of “the white South’s method of dealing with colored Americans,” and would concede to “admitting the colored people into the American brotherhood … only after 1000 years of ‘civilization.’”⁠Go to footnote 497 detail

The Harvard graduate William Monroe Trotter cofounded the newspaper the Boston Guardian and, with his fellow Harvard alumnus W. E. B. Du Bois, the Niagara Movement—the forerunner of the NAACP. HUD 295.04 vol. 2, Harvard University Archives

Eliot’s response two days later attempted some clarification of his opinions, which, he noted, were “not newly formed.”⁠Go to footnote 498 detail First, he explained, “The Whites and the Negroes had better live beside each other in entire amity, but separate, under equal laws.” He expressed support for Black suffrage, albeit with a poll tax for all voters, and held that “political equality seems to me to have nothing whatever to do with what is called social equality” and will not lead to “social admixture.”⁠Go to footnote 499 detail He offered his own observations about the South, including his assessment that “it would take four or five generations more to teach the mass of the negro population that civilization is built on willingness to work hard six days in the week, and to be frugal all the time,” partly because it would be “unreasonable to expect that people who had so recently been savages and slaves should all acquire in forty years the primary virtues of civilization.” For good measure, Eliot concluded his letter with the assertion that “as to intermarriage between Whites and Blacks, all the best evidence seems to me to show that it is inexpedient.”⁠Go to footnote 500 detail

When Trotter responded the next day with additional questions about the application of Eliot’s opinions to “actual conditions,” noting that “I believe I am correct in saying the Colored people are quite anxious to know your views,” he received no reply.⁠Go to footnote 501 detail There is likewise no recorded response to Trotter’s second prompt for a reply some five days later.

Eliot’s stature and political savvy set him up to play an active supporting role in the rising eugenics movement in his post-presidency years. He warned that “the increase of liberty for all classes of the community seems to promote the rapid breeding of the defective, irresponsible and vicious” and advocated preventing “the feeble-minded” from “breeding their like.”⁠Go to footnote 502 detailHe stopped short of other Harvard affiliates—including his secretary, Frank W. Taussig, who went on to become a faculty member and argued that, although society “[had] not reached the stage where we can proceed to chloroform them once for all,” the “feeble minded” could at least be “segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.”⁠Go to footnote 503 detail

Charles B. Davenport, William E. Castle, and the International Eugenics Movement

As the eugenics movement took hold in the early 20th century, another Harvard affiliate, Charles B. Davenport (AB 1889; AM 1890; PhD 1892), became one of its key leaders.⁠Go to footnote 504 detail Davenport studied biology at Harvard and stayed on as an instructor until 1899, when he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1910, Davenport and his fellow eugenics leader Harry H. Laughlin established the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York,⁠Go to footnote 505 detail which became a center for the eugenics movement and produced a wide range of research and propaganda.⁠Go to footnote 506 detail His 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, became the standard text for eugenics courses at colleges and universities across the country and was cited by more than a third of high-school biology textbooks of the era.⁠Go to footnote 507 detail Like his fellow eugenicists, Davenport believed in biological differences among races and the distinctiveness and superiority of the white race, and he virulently opposed race mixing. He advocated for racial restrictions on immigration; “selective elimination” of undesirable people; and acceptance of “the principle of the inequality of generating strains” and “eugenical ideals … in mating,” such that “strains with new and better combinations of traits may arise and our nation take front rank in culture among the nations of ancient and modern times.”⁠Go to footnote 508 detail

Charles B. Davenport earned his PhD at Harvard in 1892 and taught at the University until 1899, meeting his wife and scientific partner Gertrude Crotty when he was her instructor at Radcliffe. Davenport went on to found the Eugenics Record Office. "Charles Benedict Davenport," 1924/MBLWHOI Library

Davenport had a significant impact on his students during his decade as an instructor at the University. Among them was a young William Ernest Castle, who would himself go on to become a major figure in eugenics at Harvard and in the United States.⁠Go to footnote 509 detail Castle enrolled at Harvard College in 1892, pursuing a second bachelor’s degree—he had previously graduated from Denison University—in botany and zoology. Castle worked as a laboratory assistant for Davenport and completed a PhD under the direction of E. L. Mark, the professor of zoology who had also advised Davenport.⁠Go to footnote 510 detail After teaching for two years at the University of Wisconsin and Knox College, Castle returned to Harvard in 1897 as an instructor and researcher in animal breeding, first at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, later at the Bussey Institution, and then the University’s center for agriculture and horticulture.⁠Go to footnote 511 detail

Castle was a prominent member of the American Breeders’ Association (today the American Genetic Association) and a founding member of the editorial board of the journal Genetics.⁠Go to footnote 512 detail In 1912, he was chosen as a member of the American Consultative Committee at the First International Eugenics Congress in London, where Charles William Eliot was then serving as vice president.⁠Go to footnote 513 detail

From 1910 to 1930, Harvard Professor William E. Castle taught a popular course, Genetics and Eugenics. His book of the same name concludes with a chapter on “The Possibility and Prospects of Breeding a Better Human Race.” HUD 293.505 (Castle, W. E.), olvwork365226, Harvard University Archives

From 1910 to 1930, Castle taught Genetics and Eugenics, one of several courses on eugenics offered across Harvard at the time.⁠Go to footnote 514 detail He published his lecture notes in 1916 in the textbook Genetics and Eugenics: A Text-book for Students of Biology and a Reference Book for Animal and Plant Breeders,⁠Go to footnote 515 detail which deployed his research into the breeding of animals to advance eugenicist arguments about humans in a concluding chapter titled “The Possibility and Prospects of Breeding a Better Human Race.”⁠Go to footnote 516 detail On race mixing, Castle argued that “from the viewpoint of a superior race there is nothing to be gained by crossing with an inferior race. … From the viewpoint of the inferior race also the cross is undesirable if the two races live side by side, because each race will despise individuals of mixed race and this will lead to endless friction.”⁠Go to footnote 517 detail Moreover, to prevent the inheritance of undesirable traits, Castle concluded that “segregation” of the “feeble-minded” should be implemented in “schools and institutions under state control.” When “segregation is impracticable,” Castle argued, the “feeble-minded … should not be allowed to marry unless first sterilized.”⁠Go to footnote 518 detail

Such ideas, which led to compulsory sterilization practices in approximately 30 states and between 60,000 and 70,000 cases of eugenic sterilization in the United States,⁠Go to footnote 519 detail were also a primary focus of Davenport’s Eugenics Record Office (ERO).⁠Go to footnote 520 detail The ERO quickly gained national and international prominence, and it sustained a dual mission to carry out research and advocate for eugenic research and eugenic policy among the public.⁠Go to footnote 521 detail The organization received funding from the Gladys and Roland Harriman Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York—a total of $1.2 million between 1910 and 1940⁠Go to footnote 522 detail—and established European connections, particularly with like-minded proponents of eugenics in interwar Germany.

Indeed, the ERO’s Eugenical News introduced German eugenics to an American audience, praised a Nazi sterilization law that drew on ERO research, and became “the main propagandists for the German eugenical cause.”⁠Go to footnote 523 detail As president of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, Davenport himself helped restore German eugenicists to a place of prominence in the international movement after World War I.⁠Go to footnote 524 detail At his alma mater, Davenport arranged for a delegation of German eugenicists to participate in Harvard’s 1936 tercentenary celebration.⁠Go to footnote 525 detail

Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue, 1636-1915, 34, 111.
Jackson, Warren Anatomical Museum, iii, v.
Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue, 1636-1890, 32.
Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue, 1636-1915, 34.
Louis Agassiz and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, A Journey in Brazil (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), https://books.google.com/books?id=TNo8AAAAcAAJ.
“Radcliffe: From College to Institute,” Harvard Radcliffe Institute, accessed August 16, 2021, https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/about-the-institute/history.
Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue, 1636-1890, 32.
Will of Alexander Agassiz, Probate Record Books (1900-1916), and Probate Docket Books (1901-1916), Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Probate Record Book, vol. 960-970, 1910, digital images, Ancestry.com, accessed February 8, 2022.
Alexander’s will also designates bequests of books and scientific apparatus to the Lawrence Scientific School and various museums at Harvard, as well as $50,000 for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston (now Cambridge) and $50,000 for the National Academy of Sciences at Washington, DC.
The Lowell Institute was founded in 1846 as an educational institution in Boston. It was endowed by a substantial bequest from John Lowell, Jr. to support the Institute’s activities, including free public lectures by experts. “Lowell Institute,” The Boston Recorder 31, no. 29 (July 16, 1846): 114. See also Margaret W. Rossiter, “Benjamin Silliman and the Lowell Institute: The Popularization of Science in Nineteenth-Century America,” The New England Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1971): 602–626.
Irmscher, Louis Agassiz, 80. Agassiz was already well known among Boston and Harvard scientists associated with the Boston Society of Natural History, where Jeffries Wyman referenced Agassiz’s work at the society’s February 1843 meeting; see, Boston Society of Natural History, Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History. Boston etc.: Boston Society of Natural History, 1841–1844, vol. 1, 100.
Irmscher, Louis Agassiz, 44-51.
Phillip Sloan, “The Gaze of Natural History,” chap. 5 in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 112-151; Mary P. Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 16.
Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 13-18.
James Poskett, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2019), 3-13.
Today, the Morton Cranial Collection is held by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaelogy and Anthropology. In 2020, in response to student protests, the collection was removed from public display. In 2021, the university announced that it was beginning a process of repatriating or reburying the remains of the individuals in the collection. See Christopher D. E. Willoughby, “Medicine, Racism, and the Legacies of the Morton Skull Collection,” History of Anthropology Review 45 (2021), https://histanthro.org/news/observations/medicine-racism-and-the-legacies-of-the-morton-skull-collection/, and Jill DiSanto, “Penn Museum Announces the repatriation of the Morton Cranial Collection,” Penn Today, April 13, 2021, https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-museum-announces-repatriation-morton-cranial-collection.
Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 39-61; Louis Agassiz, “Transcript of letter to R. M. Agassiz et al. [Boston], December 2, 1846,” Louis Agassiz Correspondence and Other Papers, MS Am 1419, Houghton Library, Harvard University, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:12379926$326i.
Agassiz, “Transcript of letter to R. M. Agassiz et al. [Boston], December 2, 1846.”
Agassiz visited scientists and research institutions like Yale, Columbia, and Princeton before stopping in Philadelphia where he observed the Morton skulls. His encounter with African American hotel workers occurred in Philadelphia following his meeting with Morton. Agassiz, “Transcript of letter to R. M. Agassiz et al. [Boston], December 2, 1846,” esp. seq. 335–336. See also Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, revised and expanded ed. (New York: NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 76–77.
Agassiz, “Transcript of letter to R. M. Agassiz et al. [Boston], December 2, 1846,” seq. 335–336; see Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 76–77.
Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 74.
Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, vol. 3, 1848-1851 (Cambridge, MA: Printed for the Society by Bolles and Houghton, 1851), 36-37.
Molly Rogers, Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 202-205.
Louis Agassiz, “Geographical Distribution of Animals,” The Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany 48, no. 2, 4th ser., 13 (March 1850): 181–204, https://books.google.com/books?id=CgEZAAAAYAAJ. For the quote, see p. 181.
Agassiz, “Geographical Distribution of Animals,” 181.
Louis Agassiz, “The Diversity of the Origin of the Human Races,” The Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany 49, no. 1, 4th ser., 14 (July 1850): 110-145, https://books.google.com/books?id=XwEZAAAAYAAJ. For the quote, see p. 143.
Scott Podolsky and colleagues at Harvard Medical School provided valuable input to the discussion of this intellectual history. See also William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815-1859 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1963); Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York, NY: Bold Type Books, 2016).
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, “Letters to Louis Agassiz, 1849-1850,” Papers of Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, 1838-1920 (inclusive), 1838-1908 (bulk), A-3, 9, Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
See Bosco, “Fugitive Slave Act.”
Agassiz, “Diversity of Origins,” 112.
Agassiz, “Diversity of Origins,” 142.
Elizabeth Cabot Cary to her mother, April 15-16, “Letters from South Carolina, Washington, New Orleans, etc., 1851-1852,” folder 10, seq. 29, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Papers, 1838-1920, A-3, Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:10431489$29i. See also Rogers, Delia’s Tears, 205.
Gregg Hecimovich, “The Life and Times of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty,” chap. 2 in To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, ed. Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press, Aperture, 2020), 106-108. See also Make Their Own Way, 279-280.
See the book review of Make Their Own Way, Parul Sehgal, “The First Photos of Enslaved People Raise Many Questions About the Ethics of Viewing,” New York Times, September 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/books/to-make-their-own-way-in-world-zealy-daguerreotypes.html.
Hecimovich, “Life and Times.”
In 1859, Agassiz presented his entire collection—including human remains, animal specimens, fossils, and more—to the Trustees. He estimated that he spent more than $10,000 of his own money—derived at least in part from the salary he received from the University, paid until 1855 by Abbott Lawrence and funded for some time thereafter by Lawrence’s bequest to the University—in collecting and preserving the specimens, see Museum of Comparative Zoology, Report of the Committee of the Overseers of Harvard College appointed to visit The Lawrence Scientific School during the year 1860; together with The Reports Submitted by the professors (Cambridge, MA: Welch, Bigelow, and Company, 1873), 45-46.
[Louis] Agassiz to Harriot Pinckney Holbrook, Monday 25, [1852?], Louis Agassiz Correspondence and Other Papers, MS Am 1419, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Harvard University, Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the President of Harvard University to the Overseers on the state of the university for the academic year 1850-1851 (Cambridge, MA: Metcalf and Company, printers to the University, 1852), 5-7, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:427074869$1i.
“An Extraordinary Importation from South Africa,” The Boston Evening Transcript, September 28, 1860.
Christopher D. E. Willoughby provided valuable input on race science at Harvard Medical School generally and on the story of Sturmann in particular, based on research for “Skull Collecting, Medical Museums, and the International Dimensions of Racial Science,” chap. 5 in Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming fall 2022).
“An Extraordinary Importation from South Africa,” The Boston Evening Transcript.
“Amusements – Boston Aquarial and Zoological Garden,” The Boston Evening Transcript, October 3, 1860.
“Amusements – The Aquarial Gardens,” The Boston Evening Transcript, October 3, 1860.
“Amusements – Boston Aquarial and Zoological Garden,” The Boston Evening Transcript.
Walter Clarence, The aborigines of South Africa, now on exhibition at the Boston Aquarial and Zoölogical Gardens in Central Court, Washington Street: giving a brief description of the southern portion of the African continent, and a sketch of the early life of each individual specimen of the nomadic tribes (Boston, MA: Printed for Cutting & Butler by J. P. Plumer, 1860).
“Amusements – Boston Aquarial and Zoological Garden,” The Boston Evening Transcript.
“Specimens of the South African Tribes,” New York Tribune, January 5, 1861; “Advertisement,” New York Herald, January 3, 1861. See also Matthew Smith Miller, “Surely his mother mourns for him: Africans on exhibition in Boston and New York, 1860-1861,” (AB thesis, Harvard University, 2011).
Sturmann’s name has been transcribed with a variety of different spellings. Here we are using the spelling that appears in the first Boston Evening Transcript announcement of the exhibition: “An Extraordinary Importation from South Africa.” It is likely that the names reported were not only printed inaccurately, but were in at least some cases assigned stage names.
“Suicide at the Aquarial Gardens,” The Boston Evening Transcript, April 29, 1861.
“Amusements—Boston Aquarial and Zoological Gardens,” The Boston Evening Transcript, April 30, 1861.
Jeffries Wyman, “Observations on the Skeleton of a Hottentot,” The Anthropological Review 3, no. 11 (October 1865): 330-335.
Wyman, “Observations on the Skeleton of a Hottentot,” 334.
Wyman, “Observations on the Skeleton of a Hottentot,” 333.
Jackson, Warren Anatomical Museum, 702.
Winsor, “‘In the Prime of His Admirable Manhood,’” chap. 1 and “‘I Have Been Disappointed in My Collaborators,’” chap. 2 in Reading the Shape of Nature; Irmscher, Louis Agassiz.
Louis Agassiz’s letters on the collections of specimens for the museum can be found in Alexander Agassiz, “Agassiz letter books, 1859-1910,” vol. 4, Alexander Agassiz and Louis Agassiz letters, June 18, 1866-July 30, 1868, Spec. Coll. MCZ F890, Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FMUS.MCZ:2709033.
In her biography of Louis, Elizabeth wrote that their marriage “connected him by the closest ties with a large family circle,” including his brother-in-law, future Harvard President Cornelius Felton (president, 1860–1862; faculty, 1832–1860; tutor, 1829–1832), quoted in Irmscher, Louis Agassiz, 278. Elizabeth was the granddaughter of wealthy merchant Thomas Handasyd Perkins (see Section III of this report), and her family ties included her namesakes, the prominent Boston (and Harvard) families the Cabots and the Carys. See “Collection Overview: Biography,” Papers of the Cabot family, 1786–2013, A-99, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, accessed February 10, 2022, https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/sch00131/catalog; “Biographical Sketch,” Thomas Greaves Cary Papers, 1832–1885, accessed February 10, 2022, https://www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0339.
Irmscher, Louis Agassiz, 297-308.
Irmscher, Louis Agassiz, 297.
Irmscher, Louis Agassiz, 298-300.
“Agassiz letter books, 1859-1910,” Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.
Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature.
Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature; Dain Borges, “‘Puffy, Ugly, Slothful and Inert’: Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880-1940,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25, no. 2 (May 1993): 235-256.
Christoph Irmscher, “Mr. Agassiz’s ‘Photographic Saloon’,” chap. 7 in Make Their Own Way, ed. Barbash et al., 205, 208-209, 214, 226-227.
Agassiz and Agassiz, Journey in Brazil, 251-252; Irmscher, “Mr. Agassiz’s ‘Photographic Saloon’,” 215-216.
Agassiz and Agassiz, Journey in Brazil, ix-x.
See Elizabeth Cary Agassiz to Sallie and Emma, January 6, 1868, seq. 87, folder 17, Letters to Mrs. Cary, Sally and Emma while they were in Europe, 1867–1868, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Papers, 1838–1920, A-3, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:rad.schl:2026876?n=87.
See also Irmscher, Louis Agassiz, 297: “In 1868, Elizabeth Agassiz published A Journey in Brazil, a vivid account of her husband’s research trip to Brazil … Here there was no more ventriloquizing for Agassiz. He was no longer her mask; instead, he had become her topic.”
Harvard biologist and historian Stephen Jay Gould, who held an Alexander Agassiz Professorship of Zoology, wrote that Elizabeth “expurgated without indication” racist passages in the collection of Louis Agassiz’s correspondence that she edited and published in 1885. Gould published many of these passages, see Mismeasure of Man, 77, quote on 79. See also Agassiz, Louis Agassiz.
Agassiz biographer Christoph Irmscher also presents evidence that Elizabeth revised her husband’s correspondence prior to publication, citing multiple letters that Louis Agassiz wrote to Samuel Gridley Howe, a member of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, in which Agassiz sought to convince Howe of the dangers of miscegenation. Irmscher, Louis Agassiz, 245-251, 390, n. 61.
Agassiz and Agassiz, Journey in Brazil, 49.
Agassiz and Agassiz, Journey in Brazil, 481.
Sollors et al., eds., Blacks at Harvard, 2. Scott graduated from the Cambridge Latin School in 1894. See Helen Fuller, “The Valedictory,” The Cambridge Tribune, June 30, 1894, https://cambridge.dlconsulting.com/cgi-bin/cambridge?a=d&d=Tribune18940630-01.2.29. Radcliffe was chartered as a degree-granting institution the same year. See “Radcliffe: From College to Institute,” Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Samuel Eliot Morison is quoted in the section on Charles William Eliot on “History of the Presidency,” Office of the President, Harvard University, accessed May 25, 2021, https://www.harvard.edu/president/history.
On Eliot’s election to the presidency: Henry James, Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University, 1869-1909, vol. 1 (Boston, MA and New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930), 194-195; Edwin C. J. T. Howard, George L. Ruffin, and Robert Tanner Freeman graduated from the medical, law, and dental schools respectively in 1869. See Sollors et al., eds., Blacks at Harvard.
Sollors et al., eds., Blacks at Harvard, 2-3; Synnott, The Half-Opened Door, 48.
Sollors et al., eds., Blacks at Harvard, 6. Eliot himself was Grant’s dental patient.
Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue, 1636-1915, 846.
See, for example, Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 1901-1915, vii-viii.
“A Plea for His Race: Booker T. Washington Tells about the Efforts of the Negro,” The Atlanta Constitution September 19, 1895. Reprinted in Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 3, 1889-1895 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 586.
Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 1901-1915, 33.
Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 1901-1915, 50-51.
See Address of Booker T. Washington: delivered at the alumni dinner of Harvard University Cambridge, Mass., after receiving the honorary degree of “Master of Arts” (Boston, MA: B. T. Washington, 1896), PDF, https://www.loc.gov/resource/lcrbmrp.t0f13/.
Sollors et al., Blacks at Harvard, xviii. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, who once served as Louis Agassiz’s assistant, became dean of the Lawrence Scientific School in 1891. See Irmscher, Louis Agassiz, 263–265; David N. Livingstone, “Science and Society: Nathaniel S. Shaler and Racial Ideology,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 9, no. 2 (1984): 181–210. Henry Eustis, who died in 1885, also served as dean of the Lawrence Scientific School, see “Prof. Henry Lawrence Eustis,” Harvard Crimson, January 13, 1885, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1885/1/13/prof-henry-lawrence-eustis-on-sunday.
Cohen, “Harvard’s Eugenics Era.”
See Section III of this report.
William Morton Wheeler, “The Bussey Institution, 1871-1929,” chap. 31 in The Development of Harvard University since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869-1929, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 513-514. After William Castle’s retirement in 1936 and the death of another primary faculty member in 1938, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health acquired the property and the Institution’s operations effectively merged with the Division of Biological Sciences in the 1960s. See Karl Sax, “The Bussey Institution: Harvard University Graduate School of Applied Biology: 1908-1936,” The Journal of Heredity 57, no. 5 (September 1966): 178.
William Ernest Castle to Charles W. Eliot, March 8, 1907, and March 7, 1908, unspecified: box 80, Castle, William Ernest, 1905-1908, Records of the President of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, Harvard University Archives. On Eliot’s involvement in convincing Castle to remain at Harvard, see J. A. Weir, “Harvard, Agriculture, and the Bussey Institution,” Genetics 136, no. 4 (April 1994): 1227-1231.
Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Harvard University, 1636-1920 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1920), 108, https://books.google.com/books?id=aQpLAQAAMAAJ.
Sargent is also the namesake of the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitative Sciences at Boston University, which acquired the Sargent School of Physical Training in 1929, see “Our History,” Boston University College of Health and Rehabilitative Sciences: Sargent College, accessed February 9, 2022, https://www.bu.edu/sargent/about-us/our-history/.
Josiah Royce and Charles William Eliot, Dudley Allen Sargent: fiftieth anniversary, 1869–1919 (Cambridge, MA: Sargent School for Physical Education, 1919?), 6.
Sargent’s project also brings to mind the history of “posture photographs” at Ivy League and Seven Sisters institutions well into the 20^th century, but further research is necessary to determine the ways in which these efforts were connected. See, for example, Ron Rosenbaum, “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal,” New York Times, January 15, 1995, https://nyti.ms/3hYy4uE.
Dudley Allen Sargent, “Physical Education in Relation to Race Improvement,” (speech, Race Betterment Conference, Battle Creek, MI, January 6-10, 1918), GV342 Sa73pei Sargent, D.A., Relation of Physical Education to Race Improvement, 1914, box 11, Papers of Dudley Allen Sargent, HUG 1768.4, Harvard University Archives.
Preliminary forms for 17600-17854, box 29, Records of the Department of Physical Education: anthropometric measurements of Harvard students, 1860-1920, UAV 689.270.1, Harvard University Archives; Class of 1860-1865, box 1, Records of the Department of Physical Education: anthropometric measurements of Harvard students, 1860-1920, UAV 689.270, Harvard University Archives; Dudley Allen Sargent, Anthropometric Apparatus with Directions for Measuring and Testing the Principal Physical Characteristics of the Human Body, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: self pub., 1887), https://books.google.com/books?id=mphAAQAAIAAJ; Ledyard W. Sargent, ed., Dudley Allen Sargent: an autobiography (Philadelphia, PA: Lea & Febiger, 1927); Dudley Allen Sargent, Handbook of Developing Exercises (Boston, MA: Rand, Avery, & Co., 1882), https://books.google.com/books?id=uCEAAAAAYAAJ.
“Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963, Anthropometric chart, 1888.” W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, MS 312, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b237-i156 and Anthropometric chart and photograph of W.E.B. Du Bois, #3129, box 9, Records of the Department of Physical Education: anthropometric measurements of Harvard students, 1860-1920, UAV 689.270.7p, Harvard University Archives.
“Collection Organization,” Dudley Allen Sargent measurement cards from schools and organizations other than Harvard, 1880-1920, HUG 1768.60, Harvard University Archives, accessed February 9, 2022, https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/hua02003/catalog.
See Dudley Allen Sargent, “The Physical Characteristics of the Athlete,” Scribner’s Magazine 2, no. 5 (November 1887): 541-561, with an extract reprinted in Harvard Crimson, November 8, 1887, accessed March 9, 2022, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1887/11/8/the-physical-characteristics-of-the-athlete/. See also Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, “The Object of Normality: Composite Statues of the Statistically Average American Man and Woman, 1890-1945,” chap. 7 in Normality: A Critical Genealogy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Dudley Allen Sargent, “Is War a Biological Necessity?” American Physical Education Review 20, no. 3 (March 1915): 142.
For example, at a 1914 conference Sargent discussed concerns about “race suicide” due to declining birth rates in some countries because, as he explained it, “inferior races and individuals tend to multiply more rapidly than the superior races.” Sargent, “Physical Education in Relation to Race Improvement." See also Dudley Allen Sargent, "The Physical Development of Women,” Scribner's Magazine 5, no. 2 (February 1889).
James, Charles W. Eliot, 1869–1909, vol. 1: xv.
“Mixture of Kindred Races,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 23, 1909, unspecified: box 222, folder 279, Race Blending, Records of the President of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, Harvard University Archives.
“President Eliot Believes Intermarriage of Races Is Bad for All Concerned,” Post (St. Louis, MO), n.d., unspecified: box 222, folder 279, Race Blending, Records of the President of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, Harvard University Archives.
“Aroused By Eliot Attack on Races,” Traveller (Boston, MA), March 8, 1909, unspecified: box 222, folder 279, Race Blending, Records of the President of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, Harvard University Archives.
“Mixture of Kindred Races,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 23, 1909, unspecified: box 222, folder 279, Race Blending, Records of the President of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, Harvard University Archives.
“He makes Cupid laugh,” illustration, unknown newspaper, n.d., unspecified: box 222, folder 279, Race Blending, Records of the President of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, Harvard University Archives.
William Monroe Trotter to Charles W. Eliot, April 28,1909, unspecified: box 114, Race, 1909, Records of the President of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, Harvard University Archives.
Charles W. Eliot to William Monroe Trotter, April 30, 1909, unspecified: box 114, Race, 1909, Records of the President of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, Harvard University Archives.
Text quoted in this and the prior sentence is from Charles W. Eliot to William Monroe Trotter, April 30, 1909. In an earlier speech at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Eliot explained his conviction that political and social equality are unrelated, saying: “For social equality rests on natural or instinctive likes and dislikes, affinities and repulsions, which no political institutions have ever been able to control.” See What Uplifts a Race and What Holds It Down, unspecified: box 220, folder 180, Records of the President of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, Harvard University Archives.
Text quoted in this and the prior sentence is from Charles W. Eliot to William Monroe Trotter, April 30, 1909.
William Monroe Trotter to Charles W. Eliot, May 1, 1909, unspecified: box 114, Race, 1909, Records of the President of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, UAI 5.150, Harvard University Archives.
Charles W. Eliot, Public opinion and sex hygiene: an address delivered at the fourth International congress on school hygiene, at Buffalo, New York, August 27th, 1913 (New York, NY: The American Federation for Sex Hygiene, 1913).
Paul A. Lombardo, “When Harvard Said No to Eugenics: The J. Ewing Mears Bequest, 1927,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 57, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 379.
See Oscar Riddle, “Biographical Memoir of Charles Benedict Davenport, 1866–1944,” in Biographical Memoirs, Volume XXV—Fourth Memoir (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1947), 83–84, http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/davenport-charles.pdf; “Galton’s Children: Charles B. Davenport,” Center for the History of Medicine at Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, accessed February 9, 2022, https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/exhibits/show/galtonschildren/galton-s-children/charles-b--davenport.
Riddle, “Charles Benedict Davenport,” 83-84; Cohen, Imbeciles, 111-112.
“Galton’s Children: Charles B. Davenport,” Harvard Medical School.
Cohen, Imbeciles, 112.
C. B. Davenport, “The Effects of Race Intermingling,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 56, no. 4 (1917), 368. See also Morris Steggerda, “Charles Benedict Davenport (1866-1944); The man and his contributions to physical anthropology,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 2, no. 2 (June 1944): 167-185.
“Background Note,” Charles Benedict Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society Library, accessed February 1, 2022, https://search.amphilsoc.org/collections/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.D27-ead.xml.
L. C. Dunn, William Ernest Castle, 1867-1962: A Biographical Memoir (Washington DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1965), 36-37, http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/castle-william-e.pdf.
Dunn, “William Ernest Castle,” 51-52; Wheeler, “The Bussey Institution,” 513.
After Castle’s retirement, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health acquired the property and the Institution’s operations effectively merged with the Division of Biological Sciences in the 1960s. See Sax, “The Bussey Institution,” 178.
Dunn, “William Ernest Castle,” 60, 63; Garland E. Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940: An Essay in Institutional History,” Osiris 2 (1986): 232.
Lombardo, “When Harvard Said No to Eugenics,” 378, 380.
Cohen, “Harvard’s Eugenics Era.”
W. E. Castle, Genetics and Eugenics: A Text-book for students of biology and a reference book for animal and plant breeders (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), https://books.google.com/books?id=R5LPAAAAMAAJ.
Castle, “The Possibility and Prospects of Breeding a Better Human Race,” chap. 27 in Genetics and Eugenics. See also Cohen, “Harvard’s Eugenics Era.”
Castle, Genetics and Eugenics, 235.
Castle, Genetics and Eugenics, 258-259.
Cohen, Imbeciles, 10. Philip R. Reilly, “Eugenics and Involuntary Sterilization: 1907-2015,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 16 (August 2015): 351-368; Black women were especially subject to these procedures in the latter half of the 20^th century.
Reilly, “Eugenics and Involuntary Sterilization,” 355.
Allen, “Eugenics Record Office.”
Egbert Klautke, “‘The Germans are beating us at our own game’: American eugenics and the German sterilization law of 1933,” History of the Human Sciences 29, no. 3 (July 1, 2016): 25-43.
Allen, “Eugenics Record Office,” and Garland E. Allen, “Science Misapplied: The Eugenics Age Revisited,” Technology Review 99, no. 6 (August 1996): 22-31.
Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994); Klautke, “‘The Germans are beating us at our own game’,” 28.
Allen, “Science Misapplied.”
In July 2020, Harvard Medical School students, faculty, and alumni petitioned for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Society to be renamed, citing his “promotion of eugenics and his violence toward Black and Indigenous peoples,” see Meera S. Nair, “Harvard Medical and Dental Students Petition to Rename Holmes Society,” Harvard Crimson, July 12, 2020, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/7/12/holmes-society-petition/.
Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue, 1636-1915, 67.
Harvard University, Quinquennial Catalogue, 1636-1915, 34, 111.
Cohen, “Harvard’s Eugenics Era.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Brahmin Caste of New England,” chap. 1 in “The Professor’s Story,” The Atlantic Monthly 5, no. 27 (January 1860): 91–93, quote on 92, https://books.google.com/books?id=BOTqCJx5RIAC; see also Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1861); Josh Doty, “Tricks of the Blood: Heredity and Repair in Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.,” chap. 4 in The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
Daniel J. Kevles, “Francis Galton, Founder of the Faith,” chap. 1 in In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York, NY: Knopf, 1985).
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Crime and Automatism: With a Notice of Mr. Prosper Despine’s Psychologie Naturelle,” The Atlantic Monthly 35, no. 210 (April 1875): 475.
While later eugenicists would cite hereditary determinism to advocate for sterilization and even euthanasia, Holmes in this paper appears to cite Galton and the inheritance of traits within families to medicalize such behavior and render it amenable to treatment. See also Podolsky, “Diversity in Leadership: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Racism, and Remembrance,” Harvard Medical School, October 29, 2020, https://dicp.hms.harvard.edu/events/2020/diversity-in-leadership (video available).
In general, Holmes Sr. has not been referred to as a eugenicist because the term “eugenics” was not coined until 1883, a year after Holmes’s retirement from HMS, see James D. Watson and Andrew Berry, DNA: The Secret of Life, (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 16. However, scholar Adam S. Cohen classifies Holmes as “an early eugenics advocate,” pointing to his coining of and understanding of the “Brahmin caste of New England” and to his published writings speculating about the application of Galton’s principles of inheritance to criminality: “If genius and talent are inherited, as Mr. Galton has so conclusively shown … why should not deep-rooted moral defects…show themselves…in the descendants of moral monsters?” See Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2017), 239–240.
J. B. S. Jackson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Warren Anatomical Museum (Boston, MA: A. Williams and Company, 1870), 74. For the skull, see ibid., 702 (specimens 3226–3232 and 3233).
Likely unbeknownst to the faculty, given the secret nature of the organization, Snowden was also a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee. See Bearse, Fugitive-Slave Law Days, 5.
Abraham R. Thompson and Joseph Tracy to the Medical Faculty of Harvard College, November 1, 1850, box 4, folder 9, seq. 10, Petitions and correspondence, re admission of colored students, 11/1850-11/1853, Harvard Medical School, Office of the Dean records, RG M-DE01, Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:51163619$10i; Nercessian, Against All Odds, 7-8.
Nercessian, Against All Odds, 9.
Nercessian, Against All Odds, 10,11.
C. A. Robertson et al. to the Medical Faculty of Harvard College, [January 3, 1851?], box 4, folder 9, seq. 1, Petitions and correspondence, re admission of colored students, 11/1850-11/1853, Harvard Medical School, Office of the Dean records, RG M-DE01, Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:51163619$1i.
Nercessian, Against All Odds, 12-13, quoting J. Randolph Lincoln and Edward P. Abbe to the Medical Faculty of Harvard University, December 10, 1850, oversized-box 7, folder 18, seq. 4, Petitions and correspondence, re admission of colored students, 11/1850-11/1853, Harvard Medical School, Office of the Dean Records, RG M-DE01, Series 00266, Countway Library of Medicine. https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:hms.count:16817776?n=4.
Nercessian, Against All Odds, 14.
The Medical Faculty of Harvard College to Abraham R. Thompson, [c. December 26, 1850], box 4, folder 9, seq. 3, Petitions and correspondence, re admission of colored students, 11/1850-11/1853, 11/1850-11/1853, Harvard Medical School, Office of the Dean records, RG M-DE01, Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:51163619$3i.

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