| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Brian Regal. Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. 2002. Pp. xix, 219. $69.95.

Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) was a first-rate science administrator and a third-rate scientist. A decade ago, the impressive story of Osborn the administrator was ably told in Ronald Rainger's An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890–1935 (1991). Now Brian Regal recounts the far less impressive story of Osborn the scientist. Regal is fair in his treatment throughout, yet little emerges in these pages to commend Osborn. Because the author largely steers clear of Osborn's successes as an administrator, some readers may be left wondering why anyone would pay much attention to Osborn's science—but then Regal finds that few scientists did so. Osborn was a science popularizer with a dangerously reactionary viewpoint whose ideas made a difference because his bully pulpit was nothing less than the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), one of America's most influential public institutions of science and one that Osborn did more than anyone else to build. Regal does not attempt to tell the story of the social impact of Osborn's ideas, it should be added. He keeps his focus on Osborn's science. . . .

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