Event Description
Some of the deepest roots of scientific racism in the United States trace to the same city that birthed the nation’s independence. In this lecture, Paul Wolff Mitchell will discuss how Philadelphia became a center for the formation of racial science in the middle of the 19th century through a focus on the skull collector Samuel George Morton.
Contextualizing Morton’s cranial race science within the structures of settler-colonialism, enslavement, and medical racism across the United States, and within transatlantic discourses about race, brains, skulls, and human origins, points to the persistent legacies of scientific racism in and beyond Philadelphia today.
Event Speaker
Paul Wolff Mitchell, PhD student in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania
Event Information
Free and open to the public. No registration required. The event can be streamed via YouTube. For more information, please visit the event webpage.
Hosted by the Science History Institute.
