The Shortest History of Eugenics

For the last two centuries, groups of influential men have, in the professed interest of fiscal responsibility, crime reduction, and outright racism, attempted to control who was allowed to bear children. Their efforts, "eugenics," characterize a movement that over the last century swept across the world-from the US to Brazil, Japan, India, Australia, and beyond-in the form of marriage restrictions, asylum detention, and sterilization campaigns affected millions. German physicians and scientists adopted and then heightened these eugenics practices beginning in 1939, starving or executing those they deemed "life unworthy of life."

But well after the liberation of Nazi deathcamps, health care workers and even the US government pursued policies worldwide with the express purpose of limiting the reproduction of poor non-whites. The Shortest History of Eugenics takes us back to the founding principles of the movement, revealing how an idea that began in cattle breeding took such an insidious turn-and how it lingers in rhetoric and policy today.

Preface: The Good Birth
Part 1: Surviving the Unfittest (c. 500 BCE to 1898)
Chapter 1: Managing Fate
Chapter 2: Degenerates                 
Chapter 3: Natural Born Criminals         
Chapter 4: From Sir Francis Galton to Connecticut     
Part 2: Making Eugenics a Science (1899-1927)     
Chapter 5: The Indiana Plan     
Chapter 6: The American Eugenics Triangle   
Chapter 7: Studying the Worst of Us 
Chapter 8: Legal Scaffolding for Eugenics         
Part 3: Cleaning the Race (1919-1945)           
Chapter 9: Drowning "the Great Race" Under a "Rising Tide of Color"                 
Chapter 10: A Global Eugenics Network               
Chapter 11: Making America White Again       
Chapter 12: Nazi Ties 
Chapter 13: To Murder Six Million         
Part 4: Population Control (1945-1980)       
Chapter 14: A Surplus Colonial Population     
Chapter 15: The Population Control Industrial Complex             
Chapter 16: The Population Bomb Bomb           
Chapter 17: Emergencies             
Part 5: Eugenics is Dead; Long Live Eugenics (1980 to today)       
Chapter 18: Resistance, Weak and Strong         
Chapter 19: From Population Control to Poverty Control         
Chapter 20: Sterilizing Criminals Again                 
Chapter 21: Newgenics?
Sources
Acknowledgments
Index