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Apr 14, 2021 · Excerpted From: Thomas Halper, Justice Holmes and the Question of Race, 10 British Journal of American Legal Studies 171 (Spring, 2021) (220 Footnotes) (Full Document) Born into a life of intellectual and social privilege, where “the flowering of New England was almost a family affair,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., as a young man was a bit ...
Aug 28, 2020 · But this was only the European half of the story, and it is high time we recognize the American physician, anatomist, poet and author Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894), who was born on Aug. 29 ...
- Dr. Howard Markel
Oct 7, 2020 · Harvard Medical Society Renamed in Honor of First Black Tenured Professor, Physician ... the Holmes Society bore the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Class of 1829, a writer, physician, and ...
Jul 12, 2020 · One of the five academic societies that students are assigned to upon entering HMS or HSDM, the Holmes Society is named after Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Class of 1829, a writer, physician, and ...
- Universities Have Been Slow to Respond
- Francis Galton’s Disturbing Legacy
- The Dark Shadow of Eugenics
- Roots of Scientific Racism
- The Confederate Surgeon Who Popularized Scientific Racism
- Removing Names and Statues Won’T End Racism, But It’S The Right Thing to Do
The history of science is shot through with racism. Ethnology, anthropology, paleontology, archaeology and zoology have all served to support racist theories, doctrines and policies, as have chemistry, medicine, genetics, mathematics and economics. Many scientists who made pioneering advances or whose achievements underpin scientific progress and t...
Eugenics is a major thread weaving through scientific racism. Alexander Graham Bell, H.G. Wells and Marie Stopes were all supporters. Francis Galton, the polymath English scientist & statistician coined the term, meaning “well-bred,” in 1883. Galton advocated the selective breeding of humans to produce a superior race. Eugenics built on Mendelian s...
Eugenics was widely embraced in the U.S. scientific and political establishments, and the dean of Harvard Medical school, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an early promoter of it. Holmes believed “Boston Brahmins”–the White elite of Boston–to have hereditary and superior bloodlines. Harvard students, faculty and alumni are now calling for the renaming...
Decades before eugenics took hold in the U.S., scientific racism had already been firmly established and many of its founders are still memorialized on campuses today. Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (CMZ) and one the first “celebrity scientists” was a leading polygenist, believing that several human rac...
In another egregious example of campus memorialization, the honors college building of the University of Alabama is named in honor of one of the most influential scientific racists of the 19thcentury. Josiah C. Nott was a surgeon, anthropologist, founder of the University of Alabama School of Medicine and a slaveholder. He was a polygenist, who bel...
History is an ongoing effort to understand the past, and heritageis the range of cultures, traditions, buildings, monuments and objects we inherit and pass on to future generations. Both are dynamic and constantly undergoing interpretation, with heritage demanding choices about what is important, to whom and why. Removing or re-contextualizing a mo...
A lifelong skeptic, he disdained all individual rights, including the right to express one’s political views. But in 1919, it was Holmes who wrote a dissenting opinion that would become the canonical affirmation of free speech in the United States. Why did Holmes change his mind? That question has puzzled historians for almost a century.
Nov 9, 2019 · On Nov. 10, a hundred years ago Sunday, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes issued a remarkable opinion that gave birth to our modern understanding of free speech. It was a complicated ...
