midterm
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1. Justin E. H. Smith —
Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference
, Chapter 1: “Curious Kinks”
MAIN ARGUMENT
Smith is asking a surprisingly difficult question:
What exactly IS race, and when did people begin thinking of humans in racial terms?
His larger argument is that we shouldn’t assume modern racial categories have always existed. Modern racial thinking emerged historically alongside changes in natural philosophy and biological classification.
Really important concept: NATURAL KIND
A natural kind = a category that supposedly exists objectively in nature rather than being a category humans invented.
Think:
Dogs and cats seem like different biological kinds.
But are “Black,” “white,” “Asian,” etc. equivalent natural biological divisions?
Smith is interested in how philosophers/scientists came to believe human beings could be sorted into such natural categories.
Race realism
A race realist believes racial categories correspond to actual, natural divisions of humanity.
Smith’s historical question isn’t simply:
“Were old philosophers racist?”
It’s more like:
How did Europeans develop the intellectual framework that allowed them to think races were natural kinds at all?
Why natural philosophy matters
During the Scientific Revolution/Enlightenment, scholars became increasingly interested in:
observing → comparing → measuring → classifying nature
But humans were part of nature too.
Therefore:
classifying nature → classifying human beings
Smith argues modern racial thought depended partly on this development.
LOCK THIS IN
Smith = race has a history. Scientific classification of nature helped make racial classification possible.
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2. Hammonds & Herzig —
The Nature of Difference
This reading gives you one of the central frameworks for your course.
MAIN ARGUMENT
Science didn’t merely observe racial differences that already existed.
Scientific practices actually helped produce, define, and reinforce categories of human difference.
The book follows racial science over more than two centuries—from Jefferson through modern genetics/genomics.
Scientists used things like:
observation
measurement
classification
experimentation
medicine
genetics
to decide which differences between people mattered.
Really important point
What scientists meant by “race” changed.
At different times, researchers focused on things like:
racial groups → racial types → populations → genes/genomes
So “race science” isn’t one continuous, unchanging idea.
Science isn’t occurring in a vacuum
Scientific ideas about race were affected by their historical and social surroundings.
That means you shouldn’t think:
racism existed → bad scientists inserted racism into otherwise neutral science.
It’s more complicated.
Ideas about race and scientific knowledge developed together and influenced one another.
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Hammonds & Herzig = science didn’t just measure racial difference; scientific practices helped construct what counted as racial difference.
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3. Joyce Chaplin — “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America”
This one is SUPER relevant to your course title.
Chaplin examines how English colonists compared English bodies and Native American bodies in early North America.
MAIN ARGUMENT
Before a fully developed modern concept of biological race existed, colonists were already developing what Chaplin calls an:
EARLY RACIAL IDIOM
An idiom here basically means a way of talking and thinking.
So:
racial idiom = a way of describing human differences that begins resembling later racial thought, even if modern race categories aren’t fully formed yet.
That’s an important distinction.
Bodies mattered
English colonists compared Native and European:
bodies
health
appearance
physical ability
adaptation to climate/environment
Natural philosophy gave Europeans a language for explaining these differences.
Environment is HUGE here.
People wondered whether climate and surroundings changed human bodies.
For example:
If Europeans lived in America for generations, would their bodies eventually become more like Native Americans?
That sounds strange now, but it mattered enormously.
Why?
Because colonists wanted to remain English/European even while living in a completely different environment.
Colonialism + science
These bodily comparisons weren’t neutral.
Claims about Native bodies could help Europeans distinguish themselves from Indigenous peoples and establish ideas about who was supposedly more civilized, capable, or suited to control land.
Connection to Smith
Smith:
How does racial thinking emerge?
Chaplin:
Here’s what an early version looked like in colonial America.
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Chaplin = before modern race was fully established, colonists used natural philosophy, environment, and bodily comparisons to develop an early racial way of distinguishing Europeans from Native Americans.
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4. Smith Chapter 4 — “The Specter of Polygenesis”
You NEED these two words:
MONOGENESIS
All humans have ONE common origin.
Traditionally compatible with the biblical story:
Adam + Eve → all humanity.
POLYGENESIS
Different human populations have separate origins.
This becomes incredibly important for race.
Smith focuses particularly on Isaac La Peyrère and his theory of pre-Adamism.
Pre-Adamism
La Peyrère suggested people existed before Adam.
That creates a huge problem for the traditional biblical history of humanity.
If everyone didn’t descend straightforwardly from Adam and Eve, scholars could begin imagining:
Maybe different human populations have fundamentally different origins.
Why that matters for race
Separate origins make human differences seem potentially deeper and more permanent.
Rather than:
“Those people look different because they live somewhere different.”
you can move toward:
“Those people are fundamentally a different kind of human.”
Smith also discusses attempts to explain human migration—how humans could have spread around the world from an original population.
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Monogenesis = one human origin.
Polygenesis = multiple origins.
Smith Ch. 4 = debates over human origins helped create the intellectual conditions for later racial thinking.
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5. Smith Chapter 6 — “From Lineage to Biogeography”
BIG NAME:
François Bernier
Bernier is often credited as an important early figure in developing the modern race concept.
But Smith makes the story more complicated.
Before this shift: LINEAGE
People often understood “race” through:
family
descent
ancestry
bloodline
Race could basically mean lineage.
Bernier’s important change
Smith argues Bernier helped separate race from strict family lineage.
Instead, he grouped humans according to physical appearance + geographic region.
That’s:
BIOGEOGRAPHY
Biogeography = understanding living things according to their geographic distribution.
So instead of:
“What family/lineage are you descended from?”
racial thinking moves toward:
“What type of human inhabits this region of the world, and what physical characteristics do they share?”
That’s a MASSIVE conceptual shift.
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Bernier = shift from lineage → geographically distributed physical human types.
Or memorize:
Race starts becoming about what you LOOK LIKE + WHERE populations come from, rather than simply family descent.
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6. Nicholas Hudson — “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’”
This pairs PERFECTLY with Smith Chapter 6.
Hudson asks:
When did people actually start using “race” in something resembling its modern meaning?
MAIN ARGUMENT
In the eighteenth century, race did NOT initially mean what race means today.
Dictionaries generally defined it more like:
lineage / family descent / breed
Hudson notes that Samuel Johnson’s dictionary did not define race as a biological subdivision of humanity.
Earlier concept: NATION
Europeans commonly described human diversity in terms of different:
nations
A nation could be understood through:
culture
politics
geography
customs
climate
There were MANY nations.
Shift toward RACE
During the eighteenth century, thinkers increasingly compressed humanity into a smaller number of broad categories.
Instead of:
many culturally/geographically distinct nations
you increasingly get:
a few large human races supposedly sharing inherited characteristics.
This matters because race becomes more biological and permanent.
Culture can theoretically change.
Your supposed biological ancestry cannot.
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Hudson = nation → race = shift from many cultural/political human groups toward fewer supposedly natural/inherited human categories.
Smith 6 + Hudson together
Smith: lineage → biogeography
Hudson: nation → race
Both show that modern race emerged through changes in how humans were categorized.
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7. H. F. Augstein — “From the Land of the Bible to the Caucasus and Beyond”
This explains something you have probably heard a million times:
Why are white people called “Caucasian”?
It traces changing theories about where humanity originated geographically.
Initially, biblical geography was enormously important.
If everyone descended from Adam and Eve and later Noah’s descendants, scholars attempted to connect human populations to biblical history.
Then natural history complicates things.
European scholars increasingly wanted natural/scientific explanations for human origins and differences.
Geography becomes central.
The Caucasus
Eventually, the Caucasus region became extremely important to European racial classification.
Despite the actual peoples of the Caucasus being extremely diverse, Europeans turned “Caucasian” into a racial type associated with Europeans/white people.
The category wasn’t simply discovered sitting in nature.
It came from historical theories about:
human origins + geography + beauty + classification.
Why this reading matters
It’s another example of categories that seem obvious today having a weird and specific history.
“Caucasian” sounds scientific.
But Augstein shows:
the category resulted from historical theories about human origins and geography.
LOCK THIS IN
Augstein = racial geography changed from biblical origins toward natural-history classifications; “Caucasian” is a historically created racial category, not an obvious timeless biological division.
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8. Suman Seth — “Race, Medicine, and Causation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World”
This is a newer article, published in 2026, and it focuses on how physicians explained differences in disease between populations.
KEY EXAMPLE: Yellow fever
Physicians noticed that different groups seemed to experience diseases differently.
John Lining, writing in South Carolina in 1753, discussed yellow fever and differentiated among groups including Europeans, Native Americans, mixed populations, and others.
But the huge question is:
WHY?
Were differences caused by:
climate?
environment?
previous exposure?
lifestyle?
constitution of the body?
ancestry/race?
That is causation.
Important concept: acclimatization
People believed bodies could become accustomed/adapted to climates.
That complicates race.
If environment changes your body’s disease susceptibility, difference isn’t necessarily permanently racial.
But if doctors attribute the difference to an inherent bodily constitution associated with ancestry, it becomes much closer to biological racial medicine.
Why medicine matters
Doctors had enormous authority to claim:
“We aren’t prejudiced—we are simply observing natural differences in bodies.”
Medicine could therefore naturalize social categories by treating them as biological facts.
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Seth = physicians turned differences in disease and bodily response into questions about race, environment, and biological causation.
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9. Thomas Jefferson —
Notes on the State of Virginia
, Query XIV
This is a PRIMARY SOURCE.
That distinction matters.
Jefferson isn’t a historian explaining racial thought.
You’re actually reading an influential eighteenth-century person doing the racial thinking.
Jefferson’s contradiction
Jefferson condemns aspects of slavery and discusses emancipation.
BUT…
he also argues that Black and white Americans could not simply live together as equals after emancipation.
He invokes what he calls differences made by nature.
Jefferson compares Black and white bodies
He discusses things like:
skin color
hair
physical appearance
body
intellect
imagination
emotion
He speculates that Black people are inferior to white people in body and mind.
BUT THIS PART IS REALLY IMPORTANT
Jefferson admits he doesn’t actually have sufficient evidence.
He essentially says his conclusion is a suspicion, because determining mental capacities scientifically would require far more evidence.
That’s fascinating because he is simultaneously:
claiming racial inferiority
AND
acknowledging weak evidence for that claim.
Phillis Wheatley
Jefferson also attacks the literary abilities of Black writers, including Phillis Wheatley, because their achievements challenge his assumptions about racial intellectual hierarchy.
Why Jefferson matters to the course
He’s using the language of:
observation + nature + physical difference + reason
to give racial hierarchy an appearance of scientific legitimacy.
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Jefferson = Enlightenment contradiction: ideals of liberty/equality coexist with slavery and claims of natural racial inequality.
That’s an AMAZING essay point.
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10. Christopher Willoughby — “Running Away from Drapetomania”
Now we’re moving into nineteenth-century racial medicine.
The central person is:
Samuel A. Cartwright
A white Southern physician and enslaver.
Cartwright invented a supposed medical disorder called:
DRAPETOMANIA
It supposedly explained why enslaved Black people ran away from slavery.
Obviously, escaping enslavement is not a disease.
But Cartwright turned resistance to slavery into a supposed medical pathology.
The REALLY important part of Willoughby’s argument
It’s tempting to study Cartwright and say:
“LOL, this one crazy racist doctor invented a ridiculous disease.”
Willoughby says that’s the wrong lesson.
Cartwright wasn’t simply some isolated fringe lunatic.
His racial thinking fit much more comfortably within mainstream nineteenth-century American medicine than we might want to believe. Willoughby specifically argues that understanding the harmful influence of racial science requires recognizing how normative this kind of thinking was within American medicine.
Medicine + slavery
Look at what’s happening:
Enslaved person:
“I want freedom.”
Slaveholding medical system:
“Your desire for freedom is evidence that something is medically wrong with you.”
Medicine therefore helps protect a social institution by making resistance appear biologically abnormal.
THIS CONNECTS DIRECTLY TO SETH.
Seth shows eighteenth-century medicine beginning to use race when explaining bodily difference.
By Cartwright’s nineteenth century:
racial assumptions are deeply embedded in medical theory.
LOCK THIS IN
Willoughby = Cartwright’s drapetomania shows medicine turning resistance to slavery into disease, and Cartwright was not merely an isolated extremist—racial medicine was embedded in mainstream medicine.
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11. Michael Yudell —
Race Unmasked
, Chapter 1: “A Eugenic Foundation”
Now we’re moving later again, into modern biology and eugenics.
EUGENICS
Eugenics = an attempt to supposedly “improve” the human population by controlling reproduction based on beliefs about inherited desirable/undesirable traits.
Race became deeply entangled with heredity and genetics.
Main point
By the twentieth century, scientists increasingly talked about heredity using newer biological language.
But older assumptions about racial hierarchy didn’t simply disappear.
They could be repackaged as genetics.
Yudell’s larger book argues that genetics and biological sciences sometimes helped preserve racial categories and racial assumptions rather than automatically eliminating them.
Eugenicists believed
Traits such as:
intelligence
behavior
ability
“fitness”
could be strongly inherited.
They therefore believed society could be improved by controlling who reproduced.
These ideas were entangled with:
racism
class prejudice
disability discrimination
immigration politics
BIG connection to the earlier readings
Look at the progression:
Chaplin:
compare bodies
↓
Bernier:
classify geographically
↓
Hudson:
nation → race
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Jefferson:
racial hierarchy presented as natural
↓
racial medicine:
racial differences treated medically
↓
Cartwright:
social resistance becomes racial pathology
↓
Eugenics:
racial/social hierarchy becomes heredity/genetics
That’s basically your course happening in front of you.
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The comparisons I would 100% know for tomorrow
Reading
The thing to remember
Smith Ch. 1
Race is historical; natural classification helped produce racial thinking
Hammonds & Herzig
Science helped construct, not merely discover, racial difference
Chaplin
Colonial English/Native bodily comparison = early racial idiom
Smith Ch. 4
Monogenesis vs. polygenesis; debates about human origins
Smith Ch. 6
Bernier: lineage → biogeography
Hudson
nation → race
Augstein
Geography/human origins → invention/history of “Caucasian”
Seth
Medicine + disease differences → questions of environment vs inherent racial constitution
Jefferson
Naturalized Black inferiority despite admitting insufficient evidence; liberty/slavery contradiction
Willoughby
Drapetomania; racial medicine supported slavery; Cartwright wasn’t simply fringe
Yudell
Eugenics/heredity gave racial classification newer biological language
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🚨 TERMS I WOULD MEMORIZE TONIGHT
Natural philosophy — early study of nature; predecessor to modern natural science.
Natural kind — a category believed to reflect a genuine division existing in nature.
Racial idiom — a way of speaking/thinking about human differences in racialized terms, even before modern racial categories fully exist.
Monogenesis — all humans share one origin.
Polygenesis — different human populations have separate origins.
Pre-Adamism — theory that humans existed before the biblical Adam.
Lineage — ancestry/family descent.
Biogeography — classification/study of living things according to geographic distribution.
Nation — historically, a cultural/geographical/political category for human groups.
Race — increasingly came to signify broad groups understood as sharing inherited/natural characteristics.
Acclimatization — bodily adaptation to a different climate/environment.
Drapetomania — Cartwright’s fabricated “disease” supposedly causing enslaved people to flee slavery.
Eugenics — attempt to “improve” human populations through control of reproduction based on heredity.
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The single timeline I want in your brain
1600s
Human difference is heavily explained using religion, lineage, geography, climate, culture, and nation.
↓
1600s–1700s
Natural philosophers increasingly study humans as part of nature.
↓
Colonial encounters create intense comparison between European and non-European bodies.
↓
Scientists/philosophers debate:
Do all humans have one origin?
MONOGENESIS vs POLYGENESIS
↓
1700s
Human classification changes.
lineage → biogeography
nation → race
Physical characteristics and geography become increasingly important.
↓
Enlightenment
People such as Jefferson use observation/natural-history language to argue that racial differences may be natural.
↓
1700s–1800s
Doctors increasingly interpret disease, health, and bodily differences through racial categories.
↓
1800s
Race becomes increasingly biologized.
Cartwright can literally classify resistance to slavery as a racial medical disorder.
↓
late 1800s–1900s
heredity/genetics + eugenics
Older racial assumptions acquire newer scientific language.
↓
BIG LESSON
The vocabulary changes, but science repeatedly participates in defining which human differences supposedly matter.
That is why Hammonds & Herzig’s argument is so useful for tying the entire course together.
And THIS is the exam-level argument
If tomorrow you get some horrible broad essay question like:
“How did ideas about human difference develop into modern racial classifications?”
Your answer is NOT simply:
“People became racist.”
A much stronger answer is:
Modern racial classification developed gradually as European thinkers changed how they understood human difference. Earlier explanations emphasized lineage, nation, climate, religion, and geography, but developments in natural philosophy encouraged scholars to classify humans as parts of nature. Colonial encounters, debates over human origins, geographic classification, and medicine increasingly framed physical differences as natural and potentially inherited. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, racial categories had become embedded in medicine, heredity, and eugenics, giving social hierarchies the appearance of biological fact.
That paragraph is basically your entire midterm in miniature.
And one distinction I REALLY want you to remember tomorrow: “people noticed human differences” is not the same statement as “modern race always existed.” Smith, Hudson, Chaplin, Augstein, Hammonds/Herzig, and Yudell are all, in different ways, showing you how particular differences became organized into something called race.
1. Main Ideas by Reading
Justin E. H. Smith — Chapter 1: "Curious Kinks"
Main Idea: Modern racial categories are historical products that emerged alongside developments in natural philosophy and biological classification.
Key Concept: The Scientific Revolution's drive to observe, measure, and classify nature led directly to attempts to classify human beings into biological kinds.
Hammonds & Herzig — The Nature of Difference
Main Idea: Scientific practices did not merely observe pre-existing racial differences; they actively constructed, defined, and reinforced categories of human difference over two centuries.
Key Concept: The definition of race continuously shifted across eras (from racial groups to types, populations, and genes) in response to changing scientific and social contexts.
Joyce Chaplin — "Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America"
Main Idea: Early English colonists used natural philosophy and physical comparisons between European and Native American bodies to establish an early racial idiom prior to modern biological race concepts.
Key Concept: Colonial comparisons of bodily health and climate adaptation served to distinguish Europeans and justify territorial dominance.
Smith — Chapter 4: "The Specter of Polygenesis"
Main Idea: Debates surrounding human origins established the intellectual framework for treating human differences as deep, permanent divisions.
Key Concept: Pre-Adamism (Isaac La Peyrère) challenged biblical monogenesis (single origin), promoting polygenesis (multiple separate origins) as a rationale for racial divisions.
Smith — Chapter 6: "From Lineage to Biogeography"
Main Idea: François Bernier was central to shifting the conceptualization of race away from family ancestry toward geographic distribution and physical appearance.
Key Concept: Transition from understanding race as lineage (bloodline/family) to biogeography (geographically distributed physical human types).
Nicholas Hudson — "From 'Nation' to 'Race'"
Main Idea: In the 18th century, human diversity was primarily organized into flexible cultural/political "nations" rather than fixed biological races.
Key Concept: Humanity was increasingly compressed from many distinct nations into a few rigid, inherited racial classifications.
H. F. Augstein — "From the Land of the Bible to the Caucasus and Beyond"
Main Idea: The racial classification "Caucasian" is a historically constructed concept rooted in 18th-century theories of geography, aesthetics, and origins rather than a timeless biological fact.
Key Concept: Shift from biblical geographic models to natural-history classifications of human origins.
Suman Seth — "Race, Medicine, and Causation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World"
Main Idea: 18th-century physicians evaluated disease patterns (such as yellow fever) to debate whether health differences resulted from environmental acclimatization or innate racial constitution.
Key Concept: Medicine naturalized social categories by presenting health variations as inherent biological traits.
Thomas Jefferson — Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV
Main Idea: Demonstrates the core Enlightenment paradox of championing universal liberty while asserting natural racial hierarchy and Black inferiority, despite explicitly acknowledging a lack of scientific proof.
Key Concept: Using the vocabulary of natural observation and reason to legitimize racial inequality.
Christopher Willoughby — "Running Away from Drapetomania"
Main Idea: Samuel A. Cartwright's diagnosis of "drapetomania" (medicalizing slave resistance) was not an isolated fringe concept, but was deeply grounded in mainstream 19th-century American medicine.
Key Concept: Medicalizing social resistance to preserve slaveholding institutions.
Michael Yudell — Race Unmasked, Chapter 1: "A Eugenic Foundation"
Main Idea: 20th-century genetics and eugenics repackaged older assumptions about racial hierarchy into modern biological and genetic language.
Key Concept: Eugenics used concepts of heredity to justify social, racial, and class hierarchies under the guise of improving population fitness.
2. Core Vocabulary & Concepts
Natural Philosophy: The study of nature and the physical universe that preceded modern natural science.
Natural Kind: A category believed to reflect a genuine, objective division existing in nature rather than a human classification construct.
Race Realism: The belief that racial categories correspond to actual, natural biological divisions among human beings.
Racial Idiom: A framework or way of speaking about human physical differences in racialized terms before modern racial categories were fully formalized.
Monogenesis: The theory that all human beings share a single common origin point.
Polygenesis: The theory that different human populations originated from separate, distinct origins.
Pre-Adamism: The hypothesis that humans existed prior to the biblical Adam, challenging traditional unified human lineage.
Lineage: Ancestry or descent tracked through family bloodlines.
Biogeography: The classification and study of living organisms based on their geographical distribution.
Nation (Historical): A category historically used to define human groups based on shared culture, politics, language, or geographic customs rather than fixed biological inheritance.
Race (Biological Concept): Broad categories dividing humanity based on shared, inherited physical features and assumed biological traits.
Acclimatization: The process through which human bodies adapt physically to new environments or climates over time.
Drapetomania: A fabricated 19th-century medical diagnosis created by Samuel Cartwright claiming that an enslaved person's urge to flee enslavement was a physical/mental disease.
Eugenics: A 19th- and 20th-century movement aimed at altering human genetic composition through controlled reproduction based on beliefs about hereditary fitness.