A Dream of the Future


Book Description

As an age of empire and industry dawned in the wake of American Civil War, Southerners grappled with what it meant to be modern. The fair expositions popular at this time allowed Southerners to explore this changing world on their own terms. On a local, national, and global stage, African Americans, New South boosters, New Women, and Civil War soldiers presented their dreams of the future to prove to the world how rapidly the South had embraced and, in the words of Henry Grady in 1890, built "from pitiful resources a great and expanding empire." Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Atlanta and Nashville world's fairs held at the close of the nineteenth century. Here, Southerners presented themselves as modern and imperial citizens ready to spread the South's culture and racial politics across the globe. Unlike the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, the Southern expositions also gave African Americans an opportunity to present their own vision of modernity within the fairs' "Negro Buildings." At the fairs, southern African Americans defined themselves as both a separate race and a modern people, as "New Negroes." In Dream of the Future, Cardon explores these assertions of Southern identity and culture, critically placing them within the wider context of imperialism and industrialization.




Freak Inheritance


Book Description

In Freak Inheritance, both leading authors and emerging voices use cutting-edge disability and cultural theories to expose the operations of eugenicist thought in historical and contemporary culture. It is the follow-up to the field-defining Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996).




Freak Inheritance


Book Description

The long-awaited follow-up to Garland-Thomson's field-defining book Freakery, Freak Inheritance illuminates the convergence of the freak show era with the eugenics era, explicating the cultural work of the freak show as a compelling range of performances of cultural and social Others that emerge as eugenic targets from the late 19th century into the 20th century and beyond. This book explores the wildly popular performances that told compelling stories about categories of people that scientific and social-scientific discourses increasingly described - and sometimes still describe - as biologically inferior. Although much work has emerged recently about the history of eugenics, this collection highlights the specific ways that modes of exaggerated commercial popular performances create a public conversation that mirrors pathological narratives of human difference that are now firmly established as the categories of normal and abnormal, healthy and diseased, beneficial and harmful. This connection between narratives of freakery and normalcy gesture towards a fuller understanding of how eugenic thinking has re-emerged strongly as a force in medical science and cultural thinking aimed at producing the supposed "best" and "most useful" kinds of people.




Andrew Jackson


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Southern states. 1908


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State Publications


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Modern Cemetery


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