Examining the history of phrenology and physiognomy, Beauty and the Brain proposes a bold new way of understanding the connection between science, politics, and popular culture in early America. Between the 1770s and the 1860s, people all across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. These once-popular but now discredited disciplines were based on a deceptively simple premise: that facial features or skull shape could reveal a person’s intelligence, character, and personality. In the United States, these were culturally ubiquitous sciences that both elite thinkers and ordinary people used to understand human nature. While the modern world dismisses phrenology and physiognomy as silly and debunked disciplines, Beauty and the Brain shows why they must be taken seriously: they were the intellectual tools that a diverse group of Americans used to debate questions of race, gender, and social justice. While prominent intellectuals and political thinkers invoked these sciences to justify hierarchy, marginalized people and progressive activists deployed them for their own political aims, creatively interpreting human minds and bodies as they fought for racial justice and gender equality. Ultimately, though, physiognomy and phrenology were as dangerous as they were popular. In addition to validating the idea that external beauty was a sign of internal worth, these disciplines often appealed to the very people who were damaged by their prejudicial doctrines. In taking physiognomy and phrenology seriously, Beauty and the Brain recovers a vibrant—if largely forgotten—cultural and intellectual universe, showing how popular sciences shaped some of the greatest political debates of the American past.
...More
Article
Benjamin Kahan;
(2021)
The Unexpected American Origins of Sexology and Sexual Science: Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard, Orson Squire Fowler, and the Scientification of Sex
(/isis/citation/CBB635751906/)
Book
Melissa Bailes;
(2017)
Questioning Nature: British Women's Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830
(/isis/citation/CBB476661069/)
Article
Eling, Paul;
Draaisma, Douwe;
Conradi, Matthijs;
(2011)
Gall's Visit to the Netherlands
(/isis/citation/CBB001034913/)
Article
Marika Plater;
(2020)
Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice
(/isis/citation/CBB031858836/)
Book
Robert R. Gioielli;
(2014)
Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago
(/isis/citation/CBB832812863/)
Book
Finseth, Ian Frederick;
(2009)
Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770--1860
(/isis/citation/CBB001231161/)
Article
Navakas, Michele Currie;
(2013)
Island Nation: Mapping Florida, Revising America
(/isis/citation/CBB001200576/)
Article
Carmen V. Harris;
(2019)
The South Carolina Home in Black and White: Race, Gender, and Power in Home Demonstration Work
(/isis/citation/CBB904806755/)
Multimedia Object
Dr. Elisa Prosperetti;
Thomas, Lynn M.;
(2020)
Lynn M. Thomas, “Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners” (Duke UP, 2020)
(/isis/citation/CBB507391314/)
Book
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders;
(2002)
Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB682563334/)
Book
William Hughes;
(2022)
The dome of thought: Phrenology and the nineteenth-century popular imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB510847617/)
Book
Dorceta E. Taylor;
(2016)
The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection
(/isis/citation/CBB299757225/)
Chapter
Hartley, Lucy;
(2006)
A Science for One or a Science for All? Physiognomy, Self-Help, and the Practical Benefits of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001232431/)
Thesis
Christopher D. Willoughby;
(2016)
Pedagogies of the Black Body: Race and Medical Education in the Antebellum United States
(/isis/citation/CBB728296810/)
Thesis
Hogarth, Rana Asali;
(2012)
Comparing Anatomies, Constructing Races: Medicine and Slavery in the Atlantic World, 1787--1838
(/isis/citation/CBB001561004/)
Book
Susanne Schmidt;
(2020)
Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché
(/isis/citation/CBB761025564/)
Article
Susanne Schmidt;
(2018)
The Anti-Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA
(/isis/citation/CBB699307947/)
Book
Kenneth Cohen;
(2020)
They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic
(/isis/citation/CBB062422855/)
Thesis
Horrocks, Thomas A.;
(2003)
Rules, Remedies, and Regimens: Almanacs and Popular Medicine in Early America
(/isis/citation/CBB001562006/)
Book
Naomi Greyser;
(2017)
On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America
(/isis/citation/CBB669157950/)
Be the first to comment!