Hamilton Cravens

What's new in science and race since the 1930s?: anthropologists and racial essentialism.

The words, rhetoric, and ideas about science, race, and public policy used in the United States clearly differ in, say, the early twenty-first century from what they were a half century ago. Scientists’ proofs, arguments, and conclusions about race, and the actions, in law and in public policy, of government on the local, state, and national level have changed over the same period. In November 2008, voters elected the first ever African-American President of the United States, overturning American political tradition. Since the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s, governments on all levels have moved to outlaw, fitfully and inconsistently, but nevertheless with some momentum, racial segregation in many areas of American life. This has not, however, led to extensive racial integration outside of public institutions. But government has been a prime mover of this new feature of American life. The assault on racial essentialism by scientists has been an important driver of this change. In a long twilight struggle since about 1930, this took almost half a century to complete. Racial essentialism, it seems, has been as American as apple pie. We might define this as insisting that a person’s character and conduct rests entirely on his or her racial identity. Advocates of racial essentialism or racism did not need proofs from the nation’s scientists that the white race was superior to all others. They “knew” (in their bones, so to speak) which races were innately superior or inferior. Such a racist consciousness was present among the European colonists who settled North America and who created the system of New-World slavery.

Recent Controversy in Human Development: A Historical View

Why has the field of human development become so controversial in recent decades? Various factors in the science’s history since the 1870s are explored within the confines of three distinct ages of American culture. For human development’s history, these ages are defined as those of child welfare (1870–1920), child development (1920–1950), and human development (since 1950). Each age had its own distinctive world view. Those of the first two ages, which assumed no individual could develop apart from a group in the social taxonomy, tended to make issues of individual and group development only occasionally controversial. The world view of our own age, dispensing entirely with such prior notions of historical determinism, encourages debate, discussion, and controversy far beyond the science’s setting.

The Wandering IQ: American Culture and Mental Testing

The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station became famous for its sensational research in mental testing in the 1930s and 1940s, which suggested that the IQs of young children could be dramatically booste

Thomas Hunt Morgan : the man and his science

The Description for this book, Thomas Hunt Morgan: The Man and His Science, will be forthcoming.