Theories of Race

Theories of Race

An annotated anthology of essays on race, 1684⁠–⁠1900

Edited and with an introduction by
Geoffrey Galt Harpham

Part of the Who’s Black and Why? project from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew S. Curran

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Race as an Object of Knowledge

Francois Bernier, “The Division of the Earth According to the Different Types or Races of Men Who Inhabit it” (1684)
Voltaire, “The Negro” (1733)
⸻, “Letters from Amabed” (1769)
John Mitchell, “An Essay upon the Causes of the different Colours of People in different Climates” (1744)
Charles-Louis Secondat, Baron de la Brède et Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (1748)
George-Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon, “Of the Varieties of the Human Species” (1749)
⸻, “The Natural History of the Ass”
David Hume, “Of National Characters” (1748, 1777)
⸻, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations” (1752)
Carl von Linné (Linnaeus), A General System of Nature (1758)
Immanuel Kant, “On National Characters” (1764)
⸻, “Of the Different Human Races” (1777)
Petrus Camper, “On the Origin and Color of Blacks” (1772)
Lord Kames (Henry Home), Sketches of the History of Man (1774-75)
Oliver Goldsmith, “Of the Varieties in the Human Race” (1774)
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (1774)
John Hunter, “An Inaugural Dissertation (On the Varieties of Man)” (1775)
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781)
Soames Jenyns, “On the Chain of Universal Being” (1782)
Johann Gottfried von Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784-91)
John Pinkerton, A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, Being an Introduction to the Ancient and Modern History of Europe (1787)
Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787)
⸻, “Remarks on Certain Strictures Made on the First Edition of this Essay, by Mr. Charles White” (1799)
Christoph Meiners, “Of the Varieties and Deviate Forms of Negroes” (1790)
Sir William Jones, “The Origin and Families of Nations” (1792)
Benjamin Rush, “Observations intended to favor a Supposition that the Black Color (as it is called) of the Negroes is Derived from the LEPROSY” (1792)
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1795)
Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799)
Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1812)
⸻, The Animal Kingdom (1817)
William Lawrence, On the Natural History of Man (1819)
Julian-Joseph Virey, Natural History of the Negro Race (1824)
Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, “On the Comparative Anatomy of the Negro and European” (1785)
Samuel George Morton, Crania Americana (1839)
George Combe, “Phrenological Remarks on the relation between the natural Talents and Dispositions of Nations, and the Developments of their Brains”
James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1841)
Josiah Nott, Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races (1844)
⸻, and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind (1854)
Louis Agassiz (1807-73), “Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal world and Their Relation to the Different Types of Man” (1854)
Charles Hamilton Smith, The Natural History of the Human Species (1848)
Samuel Kneeland, “Introduction” to The Natural History of the Human Species
Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (1850)
Frederick Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered” (1854)
Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races (1856; orig. pub., 1853)
Ernest Renan, The Future of Science: Ideas of 1848 (1891)
⸻, Histoire Générale et Système Comparé des Langues Sémitiques (1855)
⸻, “Intellectual and Moral Reform” (1871)
James McCune Smith, “On the Fourteenth Query of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia” (1859)
Alfred Russel Wallace, “The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of ‘Natural Selection’” (1864)
Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863)
⸻, “Emancipation — Black and White” (1865).
James Hunt, “On the Negro’s Place in Nature” (1863)
Carl Vogt, Lectures on Man (1864)
Paul Broca, “On the Phenomenon of Hybridity in the Genus Homo” (1864)
Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation (1868)
Jules Michelet, “Preface to The History of France (1869)”
Francis Galton, “The Comparative Worth of Different Races” (1869)
Jean-Louis-Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau, The Human Species (1877)
Anténor Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races (1885)
Paul Topinard, “On ‘Race’ in Anthropology” (1892)
Rudolf Virchow, “Heredity and the Formation of Races” (1896)
Joseph Deniker, The Races of Man (1900)
William Z. Ripley, “Deniker’s Classification of the Races of Europe,” (1899)