During the course of American history, scientific theories have been used to legitimate racial ideas that in turn have been important in creating and interpreting the law. Race and Science collects essays from leading voices in law, history, history of science, botany, and the social sciences, resulting in a rich and comprehensive multidisciplinary exploration of the roots of and the scientific challenges to racial essentialism.
The notion that someone's racial identity and characteristics define everything of importance about them has become deeply embedded in American culture, society,...

Offers a collection of emotionally charged photographs that document a poignant day in American history. This title offers a photo-essay documenting the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of August 28, 1963, the historic day on which Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his I Have a Dream speech at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.

A number of years ago I began a project to derme and evaluate the impact of Buffon's Histoire naturelle on the science of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My attention, however, was soon diverted by the striking difference between the highly literary natural history of Buffon and the duller, but more rigor ous, zoology of his successors, and I began to try to understand this transformation of natural history into a set of separate scientific disciplines (geology, botany, ornithology, entomology, ichthyology, etc. ). Historical literature on the emergence of the biological...