Evangelizing Eugenics: A Brief Historiography of Popular and Formal American Eugenics Education (1908-1948)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the history of the American Eugenics movement’s penetration into the formal and popular educational milieu during the first half of the 20th Century, and includes a review of some recent scholarly research on eugenic themes in education and popular culture. Apologists have dismissed the American Eugenics movement as a shortlived, racist, reactionary, and pseudoscientific aberration that was already dying long before the collapse of the Third Reich. Many official histories of biology and various social science disciplines including education were sanitized to expunge or trivialize the involvement of a host of important prophets, disciples, and evangelists in the eugenics movement. It was also common to divorce the research and statistical methods developed in the service of eugenics from their inspiration and original application to Galton’s secular religion of human betterment. In the last few decades, however, a new generation of scholars began to re-examine and illuminate the breadth and depth of the eugenics movement: its devotees and devotees’ actions and influence on their professions or academic disciplines and on society. These scholars also looked into how eugenics penetrated educational thought, curriculum, courses, and texts; thereby, revealing a panoply of overlapping interests, academic programs, organizations, and influential individuals that fatefully intersected and synergistically recombined into a powerful social movement throughout the first half of the 1900s.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it