MAURY, Louis Ferdinand Alfred
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Indigenous races of the earth; or new chapters of ethnological enquiry: Including monographs on special departments of philology, iconography, cranioscopy, palaeontology, pathology, archaeology, comparative geography and natural history: Contributed by Alfred Maury, Francis Pulszky, and J. Aiken Meigs. With contributions from Jos. Leiden and L. Agassiz. Presenting fresh investigations by J. C. Nott and Geo. R. Glidden.Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857.Expensively produced, and sold in both standard and large paper subscriber editions, Nott and Gliddon's work was one of the most egregiously racist publications in the history of physical anthropology. Nott, a prominent Southern physician, was a member of Samuel George Morton's American School of Anthropology, which held that that the different races of humankind represented separate species with separate, ancient origins predating the Biblical "creation." Polygenist arguments about race were particularly attractive in the antebellum South, as they provided support for slavery without overtly contradicting the Bible's account of the creation. One of the most outrageous of these arguments (by our standards) was Agassiz's correlation of the geographical distribution of monkeys with that of the "inferior" (i.e., non-white) races of man, an idea further developed by Gliddon in a fold-out chart. This chart, as well as the large folding "Ethnographic Tableau" at the front of the book, are hand-colored in the subscriber's edition; in the regular small-paper edition they are uncolored. Digital facsimile of a "Subscriber's Copy" from the Internet Archive at this link. Subjects: ANTHROPOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY › Craniology, ANTHROPOLOGY › Ethnology, ANTHROPOLOGY › Physical Anthropology, COUNTRIES, CONTINENTS AND REGIONS › United States , COUNTRIES, CONTINENTS AND REGIONS › United States › American South |