Home - Textbook History

Mining 200 years of anatomy, biology, and history textbooks to tell stories of surprising relevance. I mean, really! Who knew eugenics would make a comeback?

Mark Andreessen’s Dangerous Dorm Room Eugenics

February 2, 2025 [updated April 12, 2025]

Seeking to cement their status, a new generation of “super geniuses” is reanimating a pseudoscience that, when last deployed, helped pave a path to the Holocaust.

Marc Andreessen. Photo: JD Lasica – https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/10082059294/

After co-authoring the Mosaic web browser and co-founding and flipping Netscape, Marc Andreessen converted millions into billions through the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. In that time, he also become a super-genius, consuming vast quantities of popular science and Ayn Rand-adjacent sociopathy and transmuting it into a power-justifying philosophy. Joining with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and a host of other wealthy secondary-source thinkers, Andreessen, along with his TESCREAL [1] brothers, believes a transhuman utopia, [2] or, more accurately, a near utopia, [3] is the destiny of our species, and that AI is our vehicle. [4] But this will only happen, Andreessen warns, if progress is not limited by bureaucratic constraints, particularly those imposed by environmentalists. Oh, also, only if smart people like him start having more children.

It’s all old wine in new bottles.

Eugenics: The ‘Rosetta Stone’ of Right Wing Politics

February 6, 2025: Includes index of related articles

Rosetta Stone. (2025, February 6). In Wikipedia.

Eugenics has come out of the conservative closet. In retreat for nearly 60 years (though never so far away as to be out of shouting distance), the ideology is roaring back. Today, arguably, eugenic thinking propels many of the right’s current obsessions, from DEI, to the dismantling of USAID, to vaccine skepticism, to immigration restriction, to pronatalism.

As Omar Wasow wrote on BlueSky, “eugenics is the Rosetta Stone for so much of Trump’s agenda.”

Textbook Reconstruction: The First Battle to “Re-white” American History

May 11, 2022

Carpetbagger and KKK Cartoon Reconstruction was a decade-plus (1863-1877) effort by the U.S. government to manage the readmission to the Union of states that had rebelled during the Civil War, with specific demands by Congress to enfranchise and empower the 4,000,000 formerly enslaved people who resided in those states. It succeeded, but only temporarily.

Under Federal watch, black men gained the right to vote, and, according to historian Eric Foner, an estimated 2,000 served in public office, including the U.S. Senate, through the nineteenth century. [1] But by 1900, through ongoing campaigns of terror and voter suppression, black Americans in the South were effectively disenfranchised.

In the decades leading up to and following this disenfranchisement, American history textbooks, academic histories and popular histories constructed a narrative that provided white citizens absolution by positioning Reconstruction as a “tragic era” of “scalawags” and “ignorant negroes” manipulated by invaders from the North, “carpetbaggers,” who “swarmed” South after the Civil War to pillage and humiliate.

This essay traces the development of this “tragic” narrative through a review of American history textbooks published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on two series: one written by the husband and wife team of Joel Dorman and Esther Baker Steele of Elmira, New York, and a second authored by Susan Pendleton Lee of Richmond, Virginia.

More “Post Scopes” Biology Textbooks Enter the Public Domain

December 5, 2023

Biology textbooks published just after the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial” of 1925 are now entering the public domain, and the insights they provide regarding the presentation of evolution and the promotion of eugenics are fascinating. Much has been made of the edits publishers forced on their authors in response to pushback from Biblical literalists. But the “fire” surrounding Scopes and its aftermath tends to obscure a more relevant story – of the rise in promotion of a brutal eugenics in the 1920s.

Julian Huxley, Eugenics and Longtermism

October 21, 2023

Julian Huxley Evidently, the “new” cause of tech millionaires and billionaires like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk is the survival of our species, at any cost, until it reaches a “transhuman” plane. Once reached, humans, or I guess post-humans, will push out into the universe physically and virtually for the next 10e100 years, and perhaps beyond.

Yes, it sounds like bad science fiction, but this idea, labeled “longtermism,” is being lustily promoted by a few very serious thinkers, including Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, and Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute, and has managed to attract, as of 2023, at least $46 billion in committed funding.

Émile P. Torres, a one-time acolyte and now very public critic, calls longtermism “quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.” According to Torres, longtermism is “straight out of the playbook” of Julian Huxley, who carried his thinly veiled faith in eugenics to his death in 1975. And longtermerists are not even veiled.

Textbook History’s Scandalous Hits

May 15, 2022

Textbook History started as a journal of social history as filtered through twentieth century American biology textbooks. Inspired by the work of Jim Endersby, John Rudolph, Donna J. Drucker, and Ronald L. Numbers, among other notable historians, it has evolved into an exploration of the intersection of popular history, popular science and popular culture since the industrial revolution.

It can get a little weedy. So, I thought I’d provide a short sampler of the more approachable stories found here.

Students of popular culture (with a dash of academic cred) are invited to dig into the Piltdown hoax, the masturbation panic of the nineteenth century, eugenic pornography, the racist origins of Alfred E. Neuman, and everyone’s favorite, girl Nazis with whips.

The (even) geekier stuff can wait.

– Ron Ladouceur

To Conserve Man

December 22, 2021

Bison from Civic Biology To our Rachel Carson-tuned ears, the word conservation means allowing nature to hold sway, to designate areas as wetlands, protected habitats, and forever wild, to be humble and accept that nature is usually smarter than we are. But to biology textbook authors in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, influenced by the eugenic ideas of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, Theodore Roosevel,t and others, conservation meant something else entirely. It meant, first, preserving select symbols of American virility, like the redwood tree, the bison, and most importantly, their own “great race,” and second, managing the rest of nature – forests, water resources, wildlife, and soil – so that it could be exploited maximally without collapse.

This ideology entered the classroom briefly, in the mid-1920s, with Benjamin Gruenberg’s Biology and Human Life (1925) [1] and George W. Hunter’s New Civic Biology (1926). [2] The two books were similar in structure (even though their authors’ politics were quite different). Both ended with linked chapters on conservation, leading to a closing call for eugenic management. But the high school classroom proved a poor platform for “human conservation,” as it was called. [3] New Civic Biology, along with other harsh economic biologies published in the early 1920s [4] gave way in the market to less didactic works. [5] Scholars often attribute this shift to the effect of the Scopes trial and the chilling effect it had on a bold or matter-of-fact presentation of evolution. But with education through the tenth grade now compulsory in all states, biology teachers, facing classrooms full of not just college-bound students but students from across the economic spectrum, may simply have preferred not to present lessons that referred to some of those students as “parasitic on society” (Hunter, 1926, 399). [6]

But in college classrooms, it was another story.

Pre- and Post-Scopes Textbooks (Finally) Come Into View

Updated December 7, 2021. (Originally published as “Pre-Scopes Textbooks Coming Into View,” January 18, 2019)

After a 96-year embargo (thanks, Sonny Bono), copyrighted works from the early- and mid-1920s are finally entering the public domain. As of January 1, 2022, this list will include textbooks and other works by prominent biologists and educators published in 1926, including Samuel. J. Holmes, George W. Hunter, Truman J. Moon, and Alfred Kinsey (yes, that Alfred Kinsey – see related article).

Why is 1926 so important? It was the year after the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial. Publishers, spooked by the possible loss of sales in the south (and everywhere else evangelicals held sway) encouraged authors to edit their texts in response. For an overview, I encourage you to read Adam R. Shapiro’s article on the topic … and mine. But now that you can do your own primary document research, I encourage you to examine these textbooks for yourself.

Gairdner B. Moment: How the Cold War Pushed an Almost Revolutionary Off the Rails

June 26, 2021

Gairdner B. Moment, a professor of biology at Goucher College from 1932 to 1970, was a textbook pioneer, the first author to use the term “Darwinian Synthesis,” [1] and the rare author in the 1940s to forward ecological awareness, not eugenic management, as the purpose of his profession. He did this with the publication General Biology for Colleges in 1942.

But then World War II happened. Biology, following physics and chemistry, muscularized its curriculum and began reasserting its claim as the central agent in the maximization of natural resources, including human resources, in a newly interconnected world.

Moment was caught in the wave and taken by its undertow.

An almost revolutionary in 1942 on the order of Rachel Carson or Marston Bates, by the 1960s, Moment devolved into a reactionary critic of the emerging culture of environmentalism he had helped spawn, and is remembered today as the scientist who wanted grizzly bears eliminated.

How Are We Going to Control These Kids? Biology Textbooks in the 1940s

July 31, 2019. (Originally published in longer form as “Biology Textbooks in the 1940s: If Not Eugenics, What?” – January 22, 2019).

The 1940s were a pupil-poor and scientifically unsettled time for U.S. secondary school biology textbook authors and publishers. The economic depression of the preceding decade led directly to a reduction in both birth rates and absolute births. Between 1940 and 1947, the number of students eligible for high school biology decreased by more than 13%. [1] Making matters worse, World War II interrupted the free flow of scientific information right as new ideas about evolution, eugenics and race were coming into focus, forcing (or encouraging) authors to rely on old information or kind of wander around.

This created an odd market where idiosyncratic works by authors on soapboxes competed for a share of a shrinking audience with barely revised reprints of out-of-date texts and encyclopedic works that purportedly instructed students how to “adjust” to life. Only a few of these weird creatures would survive the decade.

Of the 16 new or revised high school biology textbooks published during the 1940s, only two managed to successfully navigate the harsh environment. The first, the perennially popular (and pandering) Modern Biology by Truman J. Moon, Paul B. Mann and James H. Otto, first published in 1921, gained a strong foothold in the market with revised editions in 1926, 1933 and 1938. It’s unlikely rival, Exploring Biology, started life as the kitchen table project of a small-town high school teacher named Ella Thea Smith and her illustrator husband, Marion Cox. By the end of the 1950s, these two textbooks would command 75% of the market. [2]