San Antonio College Library

"Keeping his focus on America, Nathaniel Comfort introduces the community of scientists, physicians, and public health workers who have contributed to the development of medical genetics from the nineteenth century to today. He argues that medical genetics is closely related to eugenics, and indeed that the two cannot be fully understood separately. He also carefully examines how the desire to relieve suffering and to improve ourselves genetically,...

In the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of men and women were sterilized at asylums and prisons across America because it was believed that criminality and mental illness were inherited. This is the disturbing, forgotten history of America's experiment with eugenics.

In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity,...

"This book is the first comprehensive analysis of eugenics in North America focused on the second half of the twentieth century. Based on new research the authors show why eugenic sterilization policies persisted after the 1940s in the United States and Canada. Through extensive archival research, they show how both superintendents at homes for the 'feebleminded' and pro-sterilization advocates repositioned themselves after 1945 to avoid the taint...

"Does the black struggle for civil rights make common cause with the movement to foster queer community, protest anti-queer violence or discrimination, and demand respect for the rights and sensibilities of queer people? Confronting this emotionally charged question, Ladell McWhorter reveals how a carefully structured campaign agains abnormality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries encouraged white Americans to purge society of so-called...