Thesis ID: CBB001561150

“Not the Race of Dante”: Southern Italians as Undesirable Americans (2009)

unapi

Mezzano, Michael John, Jr. (Author)


Boston College
O'Toole, James M.


Publication Date: 2009
Edition Details: Advisor: O'Toole, James M.
Physical Details: 581 pp.
Language: English

This dissertation argues that the movement to restrict European immigration to the United States in the early 1900s was critically supported by a set of ideas that the dissertation refers to as "classic racialism." Derived from several intellectual traditions - such as anthropology, biology, criminology, eugenics and zoology - classic racialism posited that differences in human population groups were biologically determined and hereditary, and because of this fact, American nativists held that the "new" immigration to the United States had to be curtailed in order to save the American Anglo-Saxon racial stock. The dissertation uses Italian immigration to the United States as a case study for understanding the fluidity of racial and biological thought. While classic racialism played a key role in supporting nativists' calls for immigration restriction, advances in methods of scientific research were revolutionizing the fields of biology, genetics and anthropology. Research in these fields cast doubts on the veracity of intellectual claims made by classic racialists, which were increasingly untenable in the light of advancing scientific knowledge. The tensions between these competing intellectual paradigms of classic racialism and modern experimentalism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries reveal the esoteric nature of scientific revolutions, in that the uncertainty and complexity of the developing biological and genetic sciences kept knowledge of scientific advances in these fields restricted to a narrow audience of professional scientists and academics. While modern experimental biology raised significant scientific doubts about the principles of classic racialism, it was the latter that influenced American immigration policy in the 1920s because of classic racialism's simplicity and the broad public recognition that "like produces like."

...More

Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 70/03 (2009). Pub. no. AAT 3349902.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001561150/

Similar Citations

Book Dorr, Gregory Michael; (2008)
Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (/isis/citation/CBB000951061/)

Article Varma, Roli; (2002)
High-Tech Coolies: Asian Immigrants in the US Science and Engineering Workforce (/isis/citation/CBB000201675/)

Book Fraser, Gordon; (2012)
The Quantum Exodus: Jewish Fugitives, the Atomic Bomb, and the Holocaust (/isis/citation/CBB001500182/)

Book Lynn, Richard; (2001)
Eugenics: A Reassessment (/isis/citation/CBB000600018/)

Book Kerr, Anne; Shakespeare, Tom; (2002)
Genetic Politics: From Eugenics to Genome (/isis/citation/CBB000410629/)

Book Amir Teicher; (2019)
Social Mendelism: Genetics and the Politics of Race in Germany, 1900-1948 (/isis/citation/CBB585433440/)

Thesis Nadkarni, Asha; (2006)
Reproductive Nationalism: Eugenic Feminist Literature in the United States andIndia (/isis/citation/CBB001561488/)

Thesis Rensing, Susan Marie; (2006)
Feminist Eugenics in America: From Free Love to Birth Control, 1880--1930 (/isis/citation/CBB001561652/)

Book Rosen, Christine; (2004)
Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (/isis/citation/CBB000410899/)

Book Jones, Jeannette Eileen; Sharp, Patrick B.; (2010)
Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality (/isis/citation/CBB001033825/)

Article Dorr, Gregory Michael; (2006)
Defective or Disabled? Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama (/isis/citation/CBB000742077/)

Article Schoenl, William; Peck, Danielle; (2010)
Advertising Eugenics: Charles M. Goethe's Campaign to Improve the Race (/isis/citation/CBB000933710/)

Book Wray, Matt; (2006)
Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (/isis/citation/CBB001021028/)

Book Thomas C. Leonard; (2016)
Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (/isis/citation/CBB839187981/)

Book Regal, Brian; (2002)
Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (/isis/citation/CBB000201525/)

Authors & Contributors
Dorr, Gregory Michael
Teicher, Amir
Wray, Matt
Wolff, Stefan L.
Varma, Roli
Shinozuka, Jeannie Natsuko
Concepts
Science and race
Eugenics
Science and society
Emigration; immigration
Science and politics
Heredity
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
Progressive Era (1890s-1920s)
20th century, late
20th century
18th century
Places
United States
Germany
Virginia (U.S.)
Great Britain
South America
Scandinavia; Nordic countries
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment