Month: February 2014

  • In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied…

  • Are You My Cousin? The New York Times 2014-01-31 A. J. Jacobs I love my family, but I’m glad I don’t have to buy birthday presents for all my cousins. I’d be bankrupt within a week. My family tree sprawls far and wide. It’s not even a tree, really. More like an Amazonian forest. At…

  • Is ruling in the genes? All presidents bar one are directly descended from a medieval English king The Daily Mail London, England, United Kingdom 2012-08-04 Snejana Farberov What do Barack Obama, Thomas Jefferson, George W. Bush and the other past U.S. presidents have in common? Besides holding the coveted title of commander-in-chief, it appears that…

  • Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast The American Historical Review Volume 119, Issue 1 (February 2014) pages 78-110 DOI: 10.1093/ahr/119.1.78 Carina E. Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts In the summer and fall of 1919, the African-owned Gold Coast…

  • “Turning Up Their Noses at the Colonel”: Eastern Aristocracy, Western Democracy, and Richard Mentor Johnson Register of the Kentucky Historical Society Volume 111, Number 4, Autumn 2013 pages 525-561 DOI: 10.1353/khs.2014.0022 Miles Smith Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas In February 1849, the Kentucky legislature debated who would represent the state and fill the open…

  • Help Out a New Study Looking at Sharing Preferences for Biracial Children! Tufts University 2014-02-06 Sarah Gaither, M.S. Social Psychology Ph.D. Candidate Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts Do you have a child (age 3-8 years) that is either biracial Black/White or biracial Asian/White and live in the Boston area? We have a new study looking at…

  • ‘Mixed’ [Watson Review] Inside Higher Ed 2014-01-31 Andrea Watson Garrod, Andrew, Christina Gómez, Robert Kilkenny, Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 208 pages. Mixed (Cornell University Press) is a collection of 12 autobiographical essays written by college students who identify as multiracial. Unlike most books that focus on…

  • “Mixed” presents engaging and incisive first-person experiences of what it is like to be multiracial in what is supposedly a postracial world. Bringing together twelve essays by college students who identify themselves as multiracial, this book considers what this identity means in a reality that occasionally resembles the post-racial dream of some and at other…

  • 12 Beautiful Portraits Of Black Identity Challenging the “One-Drop” Rule PolicyMic New York, New York 2014-02-06 Amirah Mercer What are you?” they’d ask, head tilted and eyes squinted. “Black,” I’d reply. “No … but like, what else are you? I know it’s not all black.” So went a typical interrogation by my peers as a…

  • The Young White Faces of Slavery The New York Times 2014-01-30 Mary Niall Mitchell, Joseph Tregle Professor of Early American History University of New Orleans For Northern readers scanning the Jan. 30, 1864, issue of Harper’s Weekly for news from the South, a large engraving on page 69 brought the war home in an unexpected…