| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bruce Dain. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 321. $29.95.
Beginning in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the major scientific issue confronting scholars and other intellectuals in the Western world increasingly became that of the "Negro's place in nature." Negroes were defined as a separate race from Europeans, but the meaning of race was diffuse and unclear. Bruce Dain looks at the earliest American writings on this topic, interrogating the meaning of race from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) to the mid-nineteenth century writings of well-known scholar/scientists such as Samuel Morton and Louis Agassiz. Using mostly primary sources, Dain explores the intellectual, social, economic, political, and epistomological contexts in which increasingly negative characterizations of blacks as an inferior product of nature were constructed. He examines the diverse arguments of both antislavery and proslavery proponents and ultimately demonstrates, indirectly, that even antislavery advocates could not escape the growing power of the ideology of race.	1
Dain begins by comparing and contrasting the ideas about nature and blackness of Jefferson and his contemporary Phyllis Wheatley, a poet and former slave who might well be considered the first black American vindicationist writer. He also compares Jefferson's beliefs about the nature of human variations with those of various European naturalists and systematists (Carl Linnaeus, the comte de Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach). While he disagrees with the view that Jefferson was the "founding father" of scientific racism, he later implicates him as an early polygenist (pp. 46, 74).	. . .

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