History 471A  SEMINAR IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE     (Burkhardt)

            Topic: Science and Human Difference from the Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century

            Hybrids, monsters, the diverse human races, domesticated creatures and their wild counterparts, civilized peoples and "savages," the upstanding citizen and the "born criminal," men and women, children and adults, the sane and the insane, all came, at one time or another, under the purview of theorists or practitioners who sought to make sense of human differences in biological terms.  This course, which takes questions of biological and racial "hybridity" as one of its main themes, will itself be hybrid in structure.  Students will be able to take it either as a seminar course (writing a research paper) or as a readings course (writing historiographic assessments of selected literature).

             The specific topics treated in the seminar will be shaped in part by the special interests of individual participants.  In general outline, the seminar will encompass the period from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century, and will address questions arising in European and American contexts.  Before the 20th century, ideas of race, blood, sex, gender, reproduction, etc. readily served as vehicles for assumptions about the social order.  In the mid-19th century, the new anthropological societies of London and Paris debated such issues as the viability of crosses between different races, the place of women in nature and society, and the prospects of acclimatizing different races to parts of the globe where the climates (and diseases) were different from those of their native lands.  Even in the 20th century, when the new science of "genetics" came into being and provided new insights into matters of heredity, ideas about the social order readily found themselves expressed in biological terms (and this still takes place at the present).  Scholars have paid attention to the interpenetration of social and biological ideas in the cases of "Social Darwinism" and "eugenics," but for many other areas there is much that remains to be explored.