Publications
The focus of this paper was a series of indigenous African skulls that were acquired by Samuel George Morton, and are still housed in the Morton Collection of Human Crania, located in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. In this paper, I examined letters written to Morton and 19th century maps of Cuba to determine the site where these skulls were originally interred. I documented that these skulls were almost certainly those of enslaved persons who died soon after arriving in Cuba from Africa. Furthermore, they were not formally buried but rather, heaped into an open pit mass grave that was previously a limestone quarry. There, the bodies were skeletonized by vultures and other scavengers.
2021. The Race Supremacist Anthropology of Christoph Meiners, its Origins and Reception
In this article, I present a translation of an extended obituary written in French by Philipp Albert Stapfer about Christoph Meiners, who first coined the term “Caucasian” to describe the peoples of the land masses that surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Mainers was race supremacist German philosopher, literary critic, and historian. A prolific writer, Menier was a severe and sometime insulting critic of Emmanual Kant. Always arrogant, Meiner’s eventually alienated himself from his German colleagues. When he died, Meiners’s ideas were largely rejected, but were appreciated by certain French race scholars. The known historic records suggests that this is the first English translation of this obituary.
In this paper, I examined drawings and text published by Johann Freindrich Blumenbach in which he described various ethnic groups, as well as the continental-level “races,” of which he claimed there were five. I documented that Blumenbach commonly described Caucasians as beautiful, but that he also described various other ethnic groups the same way. I also documented that he consistently wrote about non-Europeans who has become highly educated in European or North American colleges. Through this, he argued that it was environment, not inheritance that shapes a person’s mental ability, regardless of race.
In this academic poster, I examine the illustration of skulls of various “races” which were published in the late 18th century by the Johan Friedrich Bluemnbach, who was opposed to race supremacy. In the early 19th century, these drawings were copied by several race supremacist scholars who slightly altered them. I determine that the copies enlarged the forehead of indigenous European skulls, was thought to be indicative of greater intellect. Similarly, the teeth of indigenous Africa skulls were extended forward, which was thought to be indicative of a more animalistic or apelike mental processing.
For this paper, I compiled 19th century reviews of Morton publications along with obituaries written about him by his professional colleges. I was able to document that Morton was not universally respected within the academic community of his era. There were many scholars, most notably Charles Darwin, who regarded his work as tendentious and poorly reasoned. However, Morton’s supporters, especially Josaih Nott, initiated a publicity campaign which exaggerated Morton’s importance as an internationally respected scholar.
In this paper, I presented evidence that while touring Britian, Johann Freidreck Blumenbach did, as some has suggested, meet with Olaudah Equiano. Blumenbach was responsible for creating the first widely accepted theory regarding the origin and nature of human racial variation. Equiano was an abolitionist author, who was born in Africa, enslaved as a child, and emancipated as an adult after having sailed throughout the world. Their meeting is evidence that Blumenbach sought to observe a literate African, while also valuing Equiano’s first-hand observations of peoples of the Americas, Africa, the Arctic, and Turkey.
In this book chapter, for which I was the co-author, we presented evidence that Morton, who was a race supremacist scholar of skull anatomy, was fully aware if research published in Germany by Friedrich Tieddemann, a scholar of skull anatomy who opposed race supremacy. In a private letter written by Morton, he admitted that he was seeking to collect the skulls of “native born” Africans, with the goal of refuting Tiedemann s published assertion that the brains of indigenous Europeans where not significantly larger than those of indigenous West and South Africans. Morton never admitted to this in his publications.
In this paper, I translated selected Latin and German text regarding on race that were authored by Johann Freindrich Blumenbach, who did not support race supremacy. I then compared then to the English translation of Blumenbach’s works, which were published decades after his death by the English author Thomas Bendyshe, who endorsed race supremacy. I document how Bendyshe consistently mistranslated words and phrases in Blumenbach’s writing to make it appear the Blumenbach was a race supremacist like Bendyshe. Specifically, Bendyshe made it falsely appear that Blumenbach held Caucasians to be more beautiful than all other human populations.
1988, “A New Look at Morton’s Craniological Research,” Current Anthropology.
For this paper, I remeasured a random sample of the Morton collection of human crania, and determined that the technique he used to measure the internal volume of skulls was reasonably accurate. This finding diverged from the claim by Steven Jay Gould that Morton mismeasured certain skulls to make them appear to be larger- or smaller-brained than they actually were. This paper also clarifies that the race supremacist assumptions Morton imbued in the way he interpreted his data, rather than the way he gathered is data. This was the only known peer reviewed published paper based on a direct observation of the Morton Collection in the entire 20th century.