With an Afterword by Theodore Koditschek A number of important developments and discoveries across the British Empire's imperial landscape during the nineteenth century invited new questions about human ancestry. The rise of secularism and scientific naturalism; new evidence, such as skeletal and archaeological remains; and European encounters with different people all over the world challenged the existing harmony between science and religion and threatened traditional biblical ideas about special creation and the timeline of human history. Advances in print culture and voyages of exploration also provided researchers with a wealth of material that contributed to their investigations into humanity’s past. Historicizing Humans takes a critical approach to nineteenth-century human history, as the contributors consider how these histories were shaped by the colonial world, and for various scientific, religious, and sociopolitical purposes. This volume highlights the underlying questions and shared assumptions that emerged as various human developmental theories competed for dominance throughout the British Empire.

How transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United States Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—Duncan Bell shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, Bell reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, Dreamworlds of Race analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.

When people today hear “paleontology,” they immediately think of dinosaurs. But for much of the history of the discipline, dramatic demonstrations of the history of life focused on the developmental history of mammals. The Age of Mammals examines how nineteenth-century scholars, writers, artists, and public audiences understood the animals they regarded as being at the summit of life. For them, mammals were crucial for understanding the formation (and possibly the future) of the natural world. Yet, as Chris Manias reveals, this combined with more troubling notions: that seemingly promising creatures had been swept aside in the “struggle for life,” or that modern biodiversity was impoverished compared to previous eras. Why some prehistoric creatures, such as the saber-toothed cat and ground sloth, had become extinct, while others seemed to have been the ancestors of familiar animals like elephants and horses, was a question loaded with cultural assumptions, ambiguity, and trepidation. How humans related to deep developmental processes, and whether “the Age of Man” was qualitatively different from the Age of Mammals, led to reflections on humanity’s place within the natural world. With this book, Manias considers the cultural resonance of mammal paleontology from an international perspective—how reconstructions of the deep past of fossil mammals across the world conditioned new understandings of nature and the current environment.

How History Works assesses the social function of academic knowledge in the humanities, exemplified by history, and offers a critique of the validity of historical knowledge. The book focusses on history’s academic, disciplinary ethos to offer a reconception of the discipline of history, arguing that it is an existential liability: if critical analysis reveals the sense that history offers to the world to be illusory, what stops historical scholarship from becoming a disguise for pessimism or nihilism? History is routinely invoked in all kinds of cultural, political, economic, psychological situations to provide a reliable account or justification of what is happening. Moreover, it addresses a world already receptive to comprehensive historical explanations: since everyone has some knowledge of history, everyone can be manipulated by it. This book analyses the relationship between specialized knowledge and everyday experience, taking phenomenology (Husserl) and pragmatism (James) as methodological guides. It is informed by a wide literature sceptical of the sense academic historical expertise produces and of the work history does, represented by thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Valéry, Anders and Cioran. How History Works discusses how history makes sense of the world even if what happens is senseless, arguing that behind the smoke-screen of historical scholarship looms a chaotic world-dynamic indifferent to human existence. It is valuable reading for anyone interested in historiography and historical theory.

This book studies the rise and nature of historicist approaches to life, race, character, language, political economy, and empire. Arguing that Victorians understood life and society as developing historically in a way that made history central to public culture, it will appeal to those interested in Victorian Britain, historiography, and intellectual history.

A collection of essays that offers “a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of the state in human subjects research” (Journal of the History of Biology). Though notoriously associated with Germany, human experimentation in the name of science has been practiced in other countries, as well, both before and after the Nazi era. The use of unwitting or unwilling subjects in experiments designed to test the effects of radiation and disease on the human body emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, when the rise of the modern, coercive state and the professionalization of medical science converged. Useful Bodies explores the intersection of government power and medical knowledge in revealing studies of human experimentation—germ warfare and jaundice tests in Great Britain; radiation, malaria, and hepatitis experiments in the U.S.; and nuclear fallout trials in Australia. These examples of medical abuse illustrate the extent to which living human bodies have been “useful” to democratic states and emphasize the need for intense scrutiny and regulation to prevent future violations. Contributors: Brian Balmer, University College London; Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald, University of Wisconsin; Rodney A. Hayward, University of Michigan; Joel D. Howell, University of Michigan; Margaret Humphreys, Duke University; David S. Jones, Massachusetts General Hospital; Robert L. Martensen, Tulane University School of Medicine; Glenn Mitchell, University of Wollongong; Jenny Stanton, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Gilbert Whittemore, independent scholar/attorney, Boston “Each chapter is a startling case study that examines the nature and degree of the state’s involvement in human experimentation.” —Issues in Law and Medicine “Well written and meticulously researched.” —Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a lyric poem, and how is it created? In Lyric Poetry, Mutlu Blasing argues that the individual in a lyric is only a virtual entity and that lyric poetry takes its power from the public, emotional power of language itself. In the first major new theory of the lyric to be put forward in decades, Blasing proposes that lyric poetry is a public discourse deeply rooted in the mother tongue. She looks to poetic, linguistic, and psychoanalytic theory to help unravel the intricate historical processes that generate speaking subjects, and concludes that lyric forms convey both personal and communal emotional histories in language. Focusing on the work of such diverse twentieth-century American poets as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Anne Sexton, Blasing demonstrates the ways that the lyric "I" speaks, from first to last, as a creation of poetic language.

DIVTheoretical investigation into the place of historicization in humanistic thought, as well as into the complex, and often tense, relationship between history and theory./div