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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $61.95

Format:
Paperback
608 pp.
6.75" x 9.75"

ISBN-13:
9780199945054

Publication date:
September 2012

Imprint: OUP US


The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics

Edited by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine

Series : Oxford Handbooks

Winner of the Cantemir Prize of the Berendel Foundation

Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon. Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states to feminist ambitions for birth control, from public health campaigns to totalitarian dreams of the "perfectibility of man." This book dispels for uninitiated readers the automatic and apparently exclusive link between eugenics and the Holocaust. It is the first world history of eugenics and an indispensable core text for both teaching and research.

Eugenics has accumulated generations of interest as experts attempted to connect biology, human capacity, and policy. In the past and the present, eugenics speaks to questions of race, class, gender and sex, evolution, governance, nationalism, disability, and the social implications of science. In the current climate, in which the human genome project, stem cell research, and new reproductive technologies have proven so controversial, the history of eugenics has much to teach us about the relationship between scientific research, technology, and human ethical decision-making.

Readership : Historians of medicine and science, race, sexuality, and population, health policy scholars, sociologists, and those involved in race and ethnic studies programs. Ideal key teaching book in senior undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of race; world history; the history of science and colonialism, including Darwinism, and in the history of medicine.

Contributors
Abbreviations
Introduction
Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford: Eugenics and the modern world
Part One: Transnational themes in the history of eugenics
1. Diane B. Paul and James Moore: The Darwinian context: Evolution and inheritance
2. Philippa Levine: Anthropology, colonialism, and eugenics
3. Marius Turda: Race, science, and eugenics in the twentieth century
4. Nils Roll-Hansen: Eugenics and the science of genetics
5. Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford: Fertility control: Eugenics, neo-Malthusianism, and feminism
6. Mathew Thomson: Disability, psychiatry, and eugenics
7. Veronique Mottier: Eugenics and the state: Policy-making in comparative perspective
8. Alison Bashford: Internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and eugenics
9. Alexander Minna Stern: Gender and sexuality: A global tour and compass
10. A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone: Eugenics and genocide
Part Two: National/colonial formations
11. Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall: Eugenics in Britain: The view from the metropole
12. Sarah Hodges: South Asia's eugenic past
13. Stephen Garton: Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of racial science
14. Yuehtsen Juliette Chung: Eugenics in China and Hong Kong: Nationalism and colonialism, 1890s-1940s
15. Saul Dubow: Eugenics in South Africa: Paradoxes in the place of race?
16. Chloe Campbell: Eugenics in colonial Kenya
17. Sunil S. Amrith: Eugenics in post-colonial Southeast Asia
18. Paul Weindling: German eugenics and the wider world: Beyond the racial state
19. Richard S. Fogarty and Michael A. Osborne: Eugenics in France and the colonies
20. Hans Pols: Eugenics in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies
21. Mattias Tydn: The Scandinavian states: Reformed eugenics applied
22. Maria Sophia Quine: The first-wave eugenic revolution in southern Europe: Science sans frontieres
23. Maria Bucur: Eugenics in eastern Europe, 1870s-1945
24. Nikolai Krementsov: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union
25. Jennifer Robertson: Eugenics in Japan: Sanguinous repair
26. Cyrus Schayegh: Eugenics in interwar Iran
27. Raphael Falk: Eugenics and the Jews
28. Patience A. Schell: Eugenics policy and practice in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico
29. Gilberto Hochman, N¡sia Trindade Lima, and Marcos Chor Maio: The path of eugenics in Brazil: Dilemmas of miscegenation
30. Wendy Kline: Eugenics in the United States
31. Carolyn Strange and Jennifer A. Stephen: Eugenics in Canada: A chequered history, 1850s - 1990s
Epilogue: Where did eugenics go?
Chronology
Index

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Alison Bashford is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on the modern history of science and medicine, including Purity and Pollution and Imperial Hygiene, and has co-edited Contagion, Isolation, and Medicine at the Border. Philippa Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, and The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset.

Writing History - William Kelleher Storey and Towser Jones
Preaching Eugenics - Christine Rosen
A Life of Sir Francis Galton - Nicholas Wright Gillham

Special Features

  • The first comprehensive collection of essays on the history of eugenics.
  • Contributors are leading authorities in their geographic fields.
  • World history approach.
  • Covers the nineteenth century to the post-World War II era.