AS OF THIS WRITING, the storied East Wing of the White House is 10 days demolished. Without reviews or permissions, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition to make way for a 90,000 square foot gilded ballroom. To many, this action, taken without consultation or the permission of any authorizing agency, felt like a physical assault.…
June 17, 2025 This is the story of Physical Culture, the pioneering health and prosperity pulp magazine, the advertisers who supported it, the messianic self-promoter who founded it, and the metastasizing exploitation culture it helped spawn. Bernarr MacFadden (1868-1955) loved few bodies more than his own. Here he serves as the model in an ad…
May 28, 2025 [updated April 12, 2025] There will be more to come on this topic, but for now, sit with this, an ad from the April 1901 edition of Physical Culture, published by Bernarr MacFadden. MacFadden was an early proponent of exercise, natural foods, and fitness. He was also a sex addict and a…
After co-authoring the Mosaic web browser and co-founding and flipping Netscape, Marc Andreessen converted millions into billions though 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 brothers, believes a transhuman utopia, or, more accurately, a near utopia, is the destiny of our species, and that AI is our vehicle. 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 himself start having more children.
February 6, 2025: Includes index of related articles 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…
In the decades following Reconstruction, a decade-plus (1863-1877) effort by Congress to enfranchise and empower the 4,000,000 formerly enslaved people who resided in those states, 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 supposedly “tragic” narrative through a review of American history textbooks published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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…
October 21, 2023 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…
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…
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 Roosevelt 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.