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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.
Full of anecdotes, oddities, and insights, The Skull Collectors takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip down a little-visited but surprisingly important byway of American history.
- Sales Rank: #884385 in Books
- Published on: 2010-10-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .80" w x 6.00" l, 1.15 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Rutgers dean of humanities Fabian (The Unvarnished Truth) aims to explore "the tension between skull size as measures of racial difference and as markers of common humanity." Unfortunately, while she touches on this fascinating point on numerous occasions, she never fully examines these issues. She provides information about some of "craniology" 's founders, the oddest stories and contradictions, but leaves the reader to synthesize it all. The first half of the book is largely devoted to the work of Samuel George Morton, a 19th-century naturalist who amassed almost 1,000 skulls and used them to argue that there were five distinct races of humans. While Fabian reports on Morton's passion and methodology, and frequently says his work was the basis for the field of "scientific racism," she doesn't allow readers to get inside Morton's head to understand his perspective. Fabian writes most eloquently about the post–Civil War national dissonance, when the government was working aggressively to bury the war dead, while also promoting the unearthing of Native American graves so skulls could be collected for "scientific" use. However, by presenting more anecdotes than insights, Fabian will leave readers unsatisfied and searching for the big picture. 30 illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Ann Fabian’s latest book is fascinating, astonishingly original, and supplies significant implications for our understanding of life and death in America—among other things. Brain capacity leads to issues of intelligence, and we all know where that leads. The subject is both curious and compelling—American studies and cultural history at its best.”
(Michael Kammen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of People of Paradox)
“Ann Fabian's The Skull Collectors has all the elements of great history: genuine surprises, originality, imaginative research, and marvelous storytelling. Even more importantly, it is a brilliant, disturbing story about the fateful convergence of science and racism in the nineteenth century. Samuel George Morton's famous skulls, and the quest by so many others to find, steal, measure, and collect so many varieties of ‘heads’ tells us much about the roots of modern racism as well as about why ‘we’ still struggle to define ourselves as one species. Fabian shows us how the dead have always been our teachers, but what we learn depends on the questions we ask.” (David W. Blight, Yale author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory , and A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped from Slavery, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation)
“A haunting voyage through the peculiar—and peculiarly American—world of human skull collecting. Ann Fabian's remarkable and moving study illuminates as few other works have the powerful hold that the dead and their remains continue to have upon the living.”
(Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History)
“Fabian provides the reader a firm understanding of the history of American physical anthropology during the nineteenth century, serving as an excellent reminder of how far methodologies have come since then. . . . This volume is an excellent contribution to growing literature in the early physical anthropological praxis.”
(American Indian Quarterly)
About the Author
Ann Fabian is dean of humanities and professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University. She is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Sometimes great -- but frustrating
By Magnus Eisengrim
I read this book to learn more about the history of scientific racism, phrenology, and pseudoscience in America. Fabian provides some fascinating glimpses of all of these. At its best, her book places these subjects in a broader context through passages that are filled with insight, and here the writing soars. For example, on phrenology:
"Population doubled in the United States in the first thirty years of the century and increased almost threefold in the next thirty. Practical-minded Americans didn't have to understand the subtleties of cranial location or intricacies in debates about the material basis of ideas to appreciate tools that smoothed their way through relations with strangers -- easy answers to hard questions. Is cruelty part of his character? Deception behind his plans?"
There's a wealth of information in this book about many aspects of 19th century America, even beyond the main topics at hand. It's worth reading for these, and for colorful details about a large cast of real-life characters.
But those expecting any real conclusions about the role and legacy of craniology in American race relations will be disappointed. Fabian's commentary shifts from one skull collector or collection to the next. It explores various connections and influences but never weighs them against other factors to clearly indict or absolve the skull collectors. In place of a methodical evaluation, there is a recurring expression of moral outrage that never leads to any deeper analysis of the harm done by the skull collectors. This makes the book feel incomplete just when it might have become both more moving and more enlightening.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
brilliantly written, and hard to put down
By Donna L. Moody
Author accomplished a well-written, well-researched scholarly work. Informative, brilliantly written, and hard to put down.
1 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
"I was curious about the skulls. Whose? Why?"
By ROROTOKO
"The Skull Collectors" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. The book interview of Professor Fabian ran here as the cover feature on December 15, 2010.
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