Collectives of Evolution - (American Culture Studies) by Heinrich-David Baumgart (Paperback)

About the Book

How did marginalized Americans harness evolutionary thought to claim social equality around 1900?

Book Synopsis

The nineteenth century was the century of evolution. No theories made a comparably seismic impact on Western intellectual life as those of Darwin, Spencer, and Lamarck. In the U.S., their ideas forced authors to rethink what it meant to be American amid racial tensions and calls for women's rights. Heinrich-David Baumgart traces how notions like uplift, eugenics, and the unconscious shaped a discursive landscape in which marginalized groups claimed social equality around 1900. Reading authors such as Frances E. W. Harper and Kate Chopin, the volume offers scholars of American literature, cultural history, and the life sciences a new perspective on the entangled histories of evolutionary thought, social emancipation, and cultural identity.

Review Quotes

»A bold and conceptually lucid intervention into the cultural history of evolutionary thought, Heinrich-David Baumgart's Collectives of Evolution traces how ideas of evolution shaped American literature, science, and politics between 1880 and 1917. This book offers a powerful new lens on how race, gender, and social justice were negotiated in postbellum America through competing models of evolutionary time. The result is a theoretically sharp, materially rich, and consistently illuminating account of a formative moment in U.S. cultural history.«-- "Prof. Dr. Frank Kelleter, John-F.-Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin"

About the Author

Heinrich-David Baumgart studied American studies, history, and literature in Berlin, Seattle, and Paris. He received his PhD from the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include memory cultures, the history of early psychoanalysis, and modern cultures of the self.