Eugenics Website Analysis

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Recommended: Positive and negative eugenics

For the last exploring history assignment, I am going to talks about the site called History of Eugenics in the U.S. The site has the option of using flash to interact with the information or using HTML, I will be using HTML. The landing page also has a link to a blog. However, for now I will describe the archive site itself. The home page of the site is called Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement. The site states that eugenics was a way to purify the genome of our species, on the misguided notion that all personality traits were genetically inherited. Therefore, if someone had a mental illness then all their offspring would of course have a mental illness as well and not be a contributing member to society. However, we now know that is not true but in the early 20th …show more content…

The link called Social Origins is a short paragraph describing how in the early 20th century scientists tried to explain social problems with scientific explanation and that one gene was responsible for mental illness. The next link is scientific origins of eugenics and this link describe how the term eugenics was first coined by Francis Galton, who encouraged healthy people to have more children. Galton’s form of eugenics is called positive eugenics, since it did not involve culling people. Negative Eugenics is the process to improve humanity by culling undesirables. The eugenics movement in the US, Germany and Scandinavia favored negative eugenics. The next link is research methods, this describes that eugenics at its core was research to apply Mendel’s laws to the inheritance of human traits. Eugenic researchers attempted to trace an inheritable trait through a family tree or pedigree and then used Mendel’s laws to those

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