The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics

Abstract The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics covers the nineteenth century to the post-World War II era and dispels for uninitiated readers the automatic and apparently exclusive link between eugenics and the Holocaust. It provides a world history of eugenics. Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon. Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states to feminist ambitions for birth control, from public health campaigns to totalitarian dreams of the “perfectibility of man.” Eugenics has accumulated generations…