Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“
Beauty and the Brain is a highly original, insightful, and engaging book. Walker’s research is groundbreaking, her analysis a model for how to produce an intellectual and cultural history, and her chapters filled with compelling evidence. By bringing together science, politics, and popular culture, Walker provides an important history of how people tried to read facial features as a mark of character for both conservative and radical purposes. This book will appeal to specialists in a range of fields including the history of science, women’s history, African American history, literary history, and visual culture.” * Corrine T. Field, University of Virginia *
“
Beauty and the Brain is an archival gem of a book that sets out the complex and contradictory reasons antebellum Americans—male and female, enslaved and free, Black and white—turned to the popular sciences of phrenology and physiognomy to navigate the roiling currents of their changing social and political worlds.” * Ann Fabian, author of The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead *
“In this lively new study of physiognomy and phrenology, Walker demonstrates how an elitist, Enlightenment ‘science of man’ was reshaped by people on the margins—women, African Americans, and a range of social reformers—to demand broader inclusiveness in the new republic.
Beauty and the Brain offers a timely and persuasive reexamination of how equality and inequality form the warp and woof of American popular culture.” * Karen Halttunen, author of Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination *
“This insightful book charts the resounding appeal of physiognomy and phrenology as forms of knowledge from the founding of the American Republic to the post-Civil War period. Rather than dismissing these sciences as quackery, Walker takes their popularity seriously and skillfully traces the contradictory ways in which they manifested themselves in popular culture and politics.” * Kathy Peiss, author of Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
One
Founding Faces
Two
A New Science of Man
Three
Character Detectives
Four
The Manly Brow Movement
Five
Criminal Minds
Six
Facing Race
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
