Title The skull collectors : race, science, and America's unburied dead / Ann Fabian

Published Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, ©2010

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 270 pages) : illustrations Contents "The promise of a fine skull" -- A native among the headhunters -- Crania Americana -- "News from the Feegees" -- The unburied dead Summary "When Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, no one cut off his head, boiled away its flesh, and added his grinning skull to a collection of crania. It would have been strange, but perhaps fitting, had Morton's skull wound up in a collector's cabinet, for Morton himself had collected hundreds of skulls over the course of a long career. Friends, diplomats, doctors, soldiers, and fellow naturalists sent him skulls they gathered from battlefields and burial grounds across America and around the world. With the Skull Collectors, eminent historian Ann Fabian resurrects that popular and scientific movement, telling the strange--and at times gruesome--story of Morton, his contemporaries, and their search for a scientific foundation for racial difference. From cranial measurements and museum shelves to heads on stakes, bloody battlefields, and the 'rascally pleasure' of grave robbing, Fabian paints a lively picture of scientific inquiry in service of an agenda of racial superiority, and of a society coming to grips with both the deadly implications of manifest destiny and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. Even as she vividly recreates the past, Fabian also deftly traces the continuing implications of this history, from lingering traces of scientific racism to debates over the return of the remains of Native Americans that are held by museums to this day."--Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-260) and index Notes Print version record Subject Morton, Samuel George, 1799-1851. Crania Americana SUBJECT Morton, Samuel George, 1799-1851. Crania Americana Subject Craniology -- Social aspects -- United States -- 19th century Anthropometry -- United States -- History -- 19th century Skull -- Catalogs and collections -- United States -- History -- 19th century Race. Racial Groups History, 19th Century Skull -- anatomy & histology Anthropometry -- history Craniology -- history Craniology -- history -- United States Anthropometry -- history -- United States History, 19th Century -- United States Skull -- United States race (group of people) SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Physical. Anthropometry SUBJECT United States https://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/D014481 Subject United States Genre/Form Electronic book History Form Electronic book LC no. 2009047712 ISBN 9780226233499 0226233499 1282894692 9781282894693

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