June 24, 2010 For most of the last 25 years, Howard M. Parshley, translator of the first English edition of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953), has been cast as a saboteur of second-wave feminism. In a 1983 article, Margaret A. Simons characterized Parshley as a barely bilingual hack, ungrounded in philosophy, and bored…
February 10, 2010 The chart below tracks the relative priority of the topic of eugenics in the American high school biology curriculum. It is based on review of 80 textbooks published between 1907 and 1969. Though there are exceptions, as a rule, textbooks first published in the years prior to 1938 were generally more eugenic…
Revised 14 February 2010 It is hard to deny that Haeckel’s embryos are an “icon of evolution,” true even if “icon” now evokes Jonathan Wells’ “travesty” of a book (see Matzke). The embryos were reproduced in a majority of high school and college biology textbooks from the mid-1930s through at least the 1960s (See table).…
November 29, 2009 In the 1950s and 1960s, Moon, Mann and Otto’s Modern Biology was the most popular high school biology textbook in the country, commanding upwards of 50% of the market. It was also among the most retrograde and out of date. Scholars have criticized the book for its weak presentation of the topic…
November 18, 2009 The Scopes trial represented both a crisis and an opportunity for biology textbook authors and publishers. George W. Hunter, author of the textbook at the center of the trial, was caught flat-footed. He and his publisher, the American Book Company, were midway through a scheduled revision to Civic Biology when the Scopes…
November 8, 2009 [List updated to include Applied Biology (1911) and Practical Biology (1916)] Google has now digitized all of the most important and popular American high school biology textbooks published before 1923. Though this cut off date, dictated by current copyright law, prevents easy review of a few significant “pre-Scopes” textbooks – specifically Henry…
September 13, 2009 Amram Scheinfeld’s 1939 You and Heredity was a bestseller, a hit not only with the general public, but also with life scientists. It was rightly lauded as an excellent layperson’s primer on the state-of-the-art in human genetics and heredity, and a serious critique of the racist, nativist and even anti-homosexual sentiments common…
August 21, 2009 Between 1907 and 1914, 12 states passed eugenic sterilization laws. As Paul A. Lombardo details so well in Three Generations, No Imbeciles, enactment of these statutes was driven by a realtively small number of lawmakers, self-promoting policy enthusiasts and a new class of bureaucrats, the directors of institutions for the “feebleminded.” These…
July 4, 2009 In its obituary, the Washington Post described Bentley Glass (1906-2005) as a “peripatetic figure in the 1950s and 1960s,” a man who seemed to be everywhere and advising everyone. In other obituaries Glass was described as “provocative” and “outspoken.” Editors of course made note of Glass’ more controversial comments, such as his…
July 3, 2009 I was not taught much of the history of eugenics in school, but I somehow absorbed that it was an “old” idea, one that had been thoroughly discredited once the horrors of the Nazis were exposed. So it came as a bit of a surprise to find that many American high school…