ReThink History: Eugenics: The Well-Born Science

society, culture, history · EN-US

We're taught that science is pure. Eugenics: The Well-Born Science is the rebuttal — a nine-part history of how 'improving the human race' by controlled breeding became mainstream, prestigious science, embraced by university presidents, Nobel laureates, and the great philanthropies, and what that respectability made possible: forced sterilization, racial immigration quotas, anti-marriage laws, and a blueprint cited by Nazi Germany at Nuremberg. From a Tlingit child's brain taken for a Smithsonian collection, through Galton and the Eugenics Record Office, the IQ test, Buck v. Bell, and the 1924 laws, to the sterilizations that ran into the 1970s and the slow reckoning since — we trace the rise, the reach, and the afterlife. The through-line: science is a method, not a priesthood, and its authority can be captured. History-first and evenhanded, working from primary documents, court opinions, and peer-reviewed scholarship; honest about what's established and what's contested. Narrated by