Typecasting

by EWEN, STUARTEWEN, ELIZABETH

• ISBN13: 9781583227350
• ISBN10: 1583227350
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-03
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Summary

"Typecasting is merely the most lucid and instructive history book to be published in the new millennium. " -Kurt Vonnegut, author of A Man Without a Country "In Typecasting, two ace historians offer a profound and sweeping study of the most everyday, often unconscious, forms of prejudice. [It's] bound to make you think-and think again. " - Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bait and Switch - Investigating the practice of science in the service of prejudice, Ewen & Ewen bring to life the dark history of the Age of Democracy, where every step toward equality has found a parallel retreat into hierarchical dogma: In 1776, as some American colonials proclaimed that all men are created equal, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, court physician to England's King George III, subdivided humanity into five unequal categories. Early-twentieth-century socialist and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger saw one of birth control's potential uses as being a tool for curbing the procreation of "socially degenerate" populations: those "unfit" for democracy. In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University suggested "issues of intrinsic aptitude" were to account for the underrepresentation of women in the sciences and mathematics. In this monumental work of popular history, Ewen & Ewen vividly expose the pivotal developments that have made stereotypes a persistent, common language. Moving across centuries and continents in thirty eloquent vignettes, their extraordinary journey uncovers the incubation of modern stereotypes in the halls of science and aesthetics and traces their materialization in the popular imagination. Their detective work in museum archives, popular magazines, and film alike, uncovers how stereotype has served as the groundwork of power in the modern world.

Author Biography

Stuart Ewen is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College, and in the Ph.D. Programs in History, Sociology, and American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Preface	p. xv
Genesis: The Modern World System
Didot's Invention	p. 3
The Company of Strangers	p. 11
Created Equal	p. 19
Visual Truth	p. 23
Curiosity Cabinets	p. 31
Taxonomies of Human Difference
Physiognomy: The Science of First Impressions	p. 45
Hierarchies of Humanity	p. 59
Camper's Angle	p. 69
Tablier Rasa	p. 83
Spurzheim's Funeral	p. 101
Crania Americana	p. 109
An American Tale	p. 123
The Pencil of Nature	p. 151
Facial Politics	p. 169
The Costermonger's Tongue and Roget's Thesaurus	p. 183
Interlude
Reverberations of Change	p. 201
The Faces of Degeneration
Identifying the Group Within the Individual	p. 211
Finding the Individual Within the Group	p. 223
Criminal Types	p. 235
Nordic Nightmares
The Amazing Race	p. 257
Morons in Our Midst	p. 279
Eugenics Goes to the Fair	p. 313
The Modern Battlegrounds of Type
Dat Famous Chicken Debate	p. 327
Male and Female Created He Them	p. 357
The Return of the Repressed	p. 375
Writing History with Lightning	p. 401
Movable Types	p. 415
Persistence of Vision	p. 437
Tales of Before and After	p. 453
Coda
Recent Social Trends	p. 473
Notes	p. 499
Bibliography	p. 519
Index	p. 535
About the Authors	p. 557
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