* Germany’s National Socialist regime took such anthropological collecting of skeletons and skulls to a perverted, murderous extreme.
† Less gently than Blumenbach, Buffon criticized Linnaeus for confusing monsters with races. Linnaeus also associated geography with temperament, a linkage that became commonplace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
* To explain his addition of the new group “Malay,” Blumenbach cites the account of Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–98) of Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific (1772–75), on which Forster and his son Georg (1754–94) headed a team of naturalists. Of English background, both Forsters lived and worked in Germany. They published accounts of the voyage: Georg Forster, A Voyage round the World, in His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, during the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5 (1777); and Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made during a Voyage round the World, on Physical Geography, Natural History, and Ethic Philosophy (1778). Johann Reinhold Forster was accepted into the Royal Society in 1771, Georg Forster in 1777, sponsored by Sir James Banks.
* The most accessible discussion of Blumenbach and his fivefold racial classification lies in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man , rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), esp. 401–12. However, as Thomas Junker points out, Gould’s visual representation of Blumenbach’s “racial geometry” conveys a misleading impression. See Junker, “Blumenbach’s Racial Geometry,” Isis 89, no. 3 (1998): 498–501.
* Blumenbach places Caucasians as far east as the river Ob’. One of Russia’s greatest rivers, the Ob’ flows north out of central Asia, passing Novosibirsk, Russia’s third most populous city, and empties into the Kara Sea.
* Here, as would other so-called authorities in race thinking, Blumenbach falls back on the authority of untutored observers to reinforce his scientific truths.
* Asch had begun his medical studies in Tübingen and then finished them in Göttingen in 1750, with the famous Albrecht von Haller, before Blumenbach’s time. Asch was born in the same year as Blumenbach’s brother-in-law, the classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), who was responsible for the Göttingen University library. The Asch-Heyne correspondence, begun in 1771, holds over 120 letters from Asch to Heyne, many accompanying Asch’s generous gifts to the Göttingen University library. In Göttingen, Asch is known as one of the library’s foremost patrons, for in addition to sending Blumenbach numerous skulls, he also enriched the university library’s collection with gifts of Slavic and Persian books.
* In the twentieth century, the most famous of the people from the Georgia of Russian fame was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (1879–1953), better known as Joseph Stalin (“Man of Steel”), whose relentless use of power largely overshadowed considerations of his looks.
* Meiners’s life is not nearly as well documented as Blumenbach’s. The fullest recent sources for information in his regard are found in the work of Dougherty, Zantop, Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, and Carhart, mentioned in this chapter’s endnotes.
† Organizations like the Royal Societies of London and St. Petersburg and Göttingen’s own Royal Scientific Society brought together “scholars and moneybags” from across the Western world.
* The popular Berlin writer August Lafontaine (1758–1831) published a four-volume satiric novel making fun of Meiners and his ugly dark and beautiful blond people in 1795–96.
* De Staël’s mother was famous as the love of the author Edward Gibbon and the host of a noted Parisian salon. The equivalence between £80,000 in 1786 and US$1.5 million today can only be approximate, given the difference in currency and the passage of so much time.
* Early in the nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt set German education on the classics, thereby furthering German Grecomania. Founded in 1810, the University of Berlin became known as Humboldt University when Germany and Berlin were partitioned between Western and Soviet spheres after the Second World War. In 1948 scholars from Humboldt founded the Free University in West Berlin. Since German reunification in the 1990s the two universities in Berlin have lived in increasingly uneasy coexistence.
* “Blue blood” is a nineteenth-century expression in English intended to differentiate people of the leisure class—i.e., people who do no work outside and whose veins therefore show through untanned skin—from workers whose outdoor labor darkens their skin sufficiently to mask the veins. It came into English from the Spanish sangre azul , denoting people of noble Visigothic rather than Jewish or Moorish descent.
* The phrase comes from Charles Sainte-Beauve (1804–69), a prominent mid-nineteenth-century French literary critic and member of the Académie Française.
* De Staël met her last partner in love, Albert-Jean-Michel Rocca (1788–1817), a Swiss hussar, in the winter of 1810–11, when she was forty-four and he twenty-two. They had a child in 1812 and married in 1816.
* De Staël and Villers got along famously at first in agreement on mysticism as well as philosophy. She welcomed mystics at Coppet, and at twenty-two he had published a novel, Le Magnétiseur amoureux (1787), whose basic theme was mesmerism. Even though relations between them cooled, she came to his defense in 1815 after he had been dismissed from his professorship at Göttingen.
* With roots in Renaissance Italy, the querelle des anciens et des modernes divided scholars in France and Britain in 1690s. The Ancients advocated the respect of models from antiquity; the Moderns preferred to take their cue from their own century (in France, the century of Louis XIV).
* Recognizing the great good On Germany could do toward fostering a German identity, Goethe dismissed her contrast between classicism and romanticism as unimportant.
* Indians appeared in the census of 1800, and colored people gained their own category in 1820; thereafter, the races broke down into white, black, and mulatto in 1850. Chinese people appeared in 1870.
† The census of 1840 asked for the number of “free white males and females” and “free colored males and females.” By 1850 the question addressed simply “each free person in a household.” The three-fifths clause remains in article 1, section 2, paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution, however, in which people bound to a term of servitude—presumably white—are counted as whole persons.
* Rhode Island delayed ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution until 1870, because legislators feared it might enfranchise members of the Celtic race. Black men had been able to vote there since 1840.
* The tangled history of the two Saxon regions in Germany would have put Jefferson off, had he sought to trace the relationship between Hengist and Horsa—who, according to Bede (ca. 730) were Jutes—and the English and Americans of his own time. Until German unification under the Prussians, provincial borders changed with the marriages, wars, and alliances of practically every new generation of rulers.
* Hengist (“Stallion”) and Horsa (“Horse”), legendary founders of Saxon England, were said to have come from Jutland (now part of Denmark). According to Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, King Vortigern invited them from Jutland to England in 449 to help repulse attacks by the Picts and Scots. Vortigern gave them the Isle of Thanet in gratitude. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes Hengist and Horsa joint kings of Kent.
* Randolph-Macon College and the University of Alabama offered Anglo-Saxon before any northern college. Amherst (1841) and Harvard (1849) Colleges were the earliest non-southern institutions to teach Anglo-Saxon.
* Reviewing Smith’s work, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, “We cannot dismiss this article without expressing the pleasure the perusal has afforded us; it is certainly a very interesting subject; whatever tends to make visible the wisdom of the Supreme Being in the world we inhabit, is of the utmost importance to our happiness; the gratification of curiosity, when excited by trivial objects, is undoubtedly pleasant; but in this instance it is a fresh support to virtue.” David Ramsay told Jefferson he admired his “generous indignation at slavery; but think you have depressed the negroes too low. I believe all mankind to be originally the same and only diversified by accidental circumstances. I flatter myself that in a few centuries the negroes will lose their black color. I think now they are less black in Jersey than in Carolina, their [lips] less thick, their noses less flat.” A graduate of Princeton from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Ramsey (1749–1815) married one of John Witherspoon’s daughters in 1783 in Philadelphia and bought a small plantation in South Carolina in 1792 before moving to Charleston in 1811.
* The first edition of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World appeared in late 1829; three more editions followed in the spring of 1830. Though differences between the editions are minor, Walker sharpened his scornful indictment of white American hypocrisy.
* After the Civil War, one of Emerson’s African American contemporaries in letters, William Wells Brown (1814–84), in The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Achievements of the Colored Race (1874), described early northern Europeans in terms reminiscent of those of both Herodotus and David Walker: “See them in the gloomy forests of Germany, sacrificing to their grim and gory idols; drinking the warm blood of their prisoners, quaffing libations from human skulls; infesting the shores of the Baltic for plunder and robbery; bringing home the reeking scalps of enemies as an offering to their king.”
* Benjamin Roberts, leader of the struggle against segregation in Boston schools, was Hosea Easton’s nephew and James Easton’s grandson. Paul Cuffee, the prosperous Afro-Indian seafaring merchant from New Bedford, married Mary Easton, one of James Easton’s daughters
* Speaking of “our German ancestors,” the views of Tacitus, and “Germanic institutions,” in France, Tocqueville echoes the views of his protégé Gobineau. This idea of two disparate French races is usually ascribed to the class-minded, extreme hereditarian historian Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722). Born in Normandy (and, therefore, by some accounts a descendant of the Vikings), Boulainvilliers was “an aristocrat of the most pronounced type” according to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica . He saw the aristocracy as the descendants of Franks from Germany and the peasants the descendants of mongrel Gauls and Romans.
* Early on, Tocqueville quickly mentions the pernicious influence of slavery in the United States: idleness, ignorance, pride, poverty, and indulgence, the weaknesses of white southerners, then moves on to the Americans he sees as typical Americans: New Englanders.
* Margaret Kohn notes that many scholars either remain silent on Tocqueville’s commentary regarding slavery and race or criticize him for evasion. Tocqueville’s own strategies corroborate the latter charge. The first and more famous volume of Democracy in America leads off with equality and relegates the discussion of three American races to the end of the book. Tocqueville admits that slavery and southern society belie his generalizations about the United States in footnotes and asides, though in his text he faults the South for sluggishness and laziness. He refers his readers to Beaumont’s work rather than integrating the multiracial theme into his analysis. Thomas Bender’s fond introduction to Democracy in America concedes Tocqueville’s avoidance of the fact of internal conflict in the United States and agrees with others who see Tocqueville as a prominent source for consensus thinkers such as Marvin Meyers and Louis Hartz.