HIS 244 History of Eugenics: Science and the Construction of Race
3 hours
This course explores the history of Eugenics in the United States in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century America. Eugenics, dubbed “the science of good breeding”, used the principles of heredity and statistics to shape people. Eugenics is now regarded as a pseudo-science, but its legacies inform the social and biological ideas of race, gender, and biology, and the formation and construction of American state power and social order. This course examines the ways in which science and medicine, when combined with powerful hate-driven ideologies, have resulted in violations of civil rights, including imprisonment, torture, sterilization, unlawful experimentation, and death. It also investigates the scientific community’s responses to these examples of extraordinary abuse, which provide the network of checks and balances currently governing scientific experimentation.
Notes
This course satisfies the John Jay College Option: Learning from the Past area of the Gen Ed Program.