National types: The transatlantic publication and reception of Crania Americana (1839)

Abstract

Samuel George Morton's Crania Americana (1839) is most often read as a foundational work for the 'American school' of nineteenth-century ethnography. In this article, I challenge such a reading by demonstrating how transatlantic connections shaped both the publication and the reception of Morton's atlas. In this lavish folio volume, complete with over seventy lithographic plates, Morton divides mankind into five races on the basis of skull configuration. However, to date, there have been no histories which consider the relevance of Morton's extensive correspondence with physicians, naturalists, and phrenologists in Europe. Furthermore, there have been no studies which consider how Morton managed the reception of Crania Americana across the Atlantic Ocean. This article resituates American ethnology within this transatlantic world, drawing on archival collections in both Britain and the United States. More broadly, it demonstrates how the history of the book can be developed as we move beyond national contexts.

The quantification of intelligence in nineteenth-century craniology: an epistemology of measurement perspective

“…His aim was to rank different racial groups based on their average cranial capacity, which he took as a proxy of brain size and, thus, of intelligence. Morton's methods of cranial measurement became internationally recognized (Poskett, 2015), while his racial hierarchies of intelligence were widely used as scientific support against anti-slavery movements (Brown, 2015). 6 In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Stephen J. Gould famously argues that these rankings are scientifically unsound because Morton's averages reflect his unconscious racial biases concerning mental worth.…”

Beyond tokenism and objectivity: theoretical reflections on a transformative equity, diversity, and inclusion agenda for higher education in Canada

“…In 1839, Samuel George Morton, an American anatomy scholar published a book entitled Crania Americana, with claims that Caucasians had the biggest brains, while Africans had the smallest, indicative of relative contrast in intellectual capacity (Poskett 2015 ; Mitchell 2018 ). J. Marion Sims considered the ‘father’ of gynecology, between 1845 and 1849, operated and experimented on Black women with no anesthesia (Ojanuga 1993 ; Lerner 2003 ).…”

Phrenology and the average person, 1840–1940

“…Dimensions of individual skulls of different 'races' were becoming available at this time, and Combe included a table in his A System of Phrenology (1825 [1819]: 477) that would be republished often. It contained the measurements of several individual skulls from different regions, but without the dimensions of the 'Caucasian' head (see also Morton, 1839;Poskett, 2015). It should be noted here that there was some tension in phrenology between the phrenologists' measurement of what they considered innate qualities and their promotion of self-improvement.…”