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E-book
Author Fabian, Ann

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
Morton, Samuel George, 1799-1851. Crania Americana
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
United States
United States
Genre/Form Electronic book
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2009047712
ISBN 9780226233499
0226233499
1282894692
9781282894693