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The Evolution Of Eugenics: The Birth Of A Movement, Caroline Tvardy

Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

This paper addresses the topic of the intellectual and academic foundations of the eugenics movement in England and the United States. It addresses how this basis formed in the highest levels of the academy and then permeated the rest of society in turn. Through this lens, it explores the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British and American spheres of scientific and pseudoscientific thought, and how many of these unsavory ideas began in the academy and percolated into the masses. This paper argues the work of prominent biologists, mathematicians, and genetic researchers of the time created and pushed the narrative of racial and …