Download e-book for kindle: The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied by Ann Fabian

When Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, not anyone bring to a halt his head, boiled away its flesh, and extra his grinning cranium to a suite of crania. it's going to were unusual, yet probably becoming, had Morton’s cranium wound up in a collector’s cupboard, for Morton himself had gathered countless numbers of skulls over the process an extended profession. associates, diplomats, medical professionals, squaddies, and fellow naturalists despatched him skulls they accumulated from battlefields and burial grounds throughout the US and round the world.

With The cranium Collectors, eminent historian Ann Fabian resurrects that well known and clinical circulation, telling the strange—and every now and then gruesome—story of Morton, his contemporaries, and their look for a systematic beginning for racial distinction. From cranial measurements and museum cabinets to heads on stakes, bloody battlefields, and the “rascally excitement” of grave robbing, Fabian paints a full of life photo of medical inquiry in provider of an schedule of racial superiority, and of a society coming to grips with either the lethal implications of take place future and the mass slaughter of the Civil warfare. at the same time she vividly recreates the earlier, Fabian additionally deftly strains the ongoing implications of this historical past, from lingering strains of medical racism to debates over the go back of the is still of local american citizens which are held by means of museums to this day.

Full of anecdotes, oddities, and insights, The cranium Collectors takes readers on a darkly attention-grabbing journey down a little-visited yet strangely very important byway of yankee history.