| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. (American Crossroads, number 17.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 347. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95.
This book by Alexandra Minna Stern fills a significant gap in recent historigraphy. Built on both meticulous archival research and deft use of visual and cultural analysis, it offers an account of the networks of individuals, institutions, physical landscape, and public discourse that constituted eugenics in California. At the same time, Stern illuminates the sweeping influence on the contours of eugenics of some of the state's most prominent citizens, including David Starr Jordan, Luther Burbank, Ezra Gosney, Charles Goethe, and Paul Popenoe.	1
Stern's well-crafted analysis is organized around the concept of eugenic landscapes, by which she draws readers' attention to the "continuities" (p. 2) among the seemingly disparate histories of the U.S. Border Patrol, campaigns to save the Redwoods, and marriage counseling. She begins with an analysis of the "vocabulary of racial degeneracy and `fitness'" (p. 30) shared by tropical medicine and eugenics at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International (PPI) Exhibit in San Francisco. The exhibit's celebration of American greatness, she argues, offered a valuable venue through which eugenic ideas entered into the state's public discourse. Stern then traces the personnel and policy connections among the Panama Canal Zone, the PPI Exhibit, and the U.S. Mexican border, whereby she reconstructs the eugenic logic underlying racialized screening and sanitation practices imposed on Mexican immigrants. Readers might be surprised to learn that, beginning in 1916, the bodies of Mexican immigrants were stamped with indelible ink to signify that they had completed required delousing procedures.	. . .

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