Kent Family Speaker Series Presents: NATION BUILDING AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE: Lessons from the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection by Dr. Pamela L. Geller

KENT FAMILY SPEAKER PRESENTS:

NATION BUILDING AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE: Lessons from the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection
Dr. Pamela L. Geller

In Becoming Object: The Sociopolitics of the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection, Pamela Geller takes a close look at the life, times, and legacy of Samuel G. Morton, a 19th century physician, naturalist, and ethnologist. To do so, she uses a biohistoric approach that examines skeletal remains and archival sources. Geller finds that during a pivotal moment in US history—an interlude between the nation’s cohesion and its civil unraveling—Morton and his medical colleagues developed biomedical interventions, public health initiatives, and scientific standards. Yet they also represented certain populations as biologically inferior; diseases were tied to non white races, suffering was gendered female, and poverty was presumed inherited. These men’s efforts made it easier to rationalize the deaths of disenfranchised individuals, collect their crania from almshouse hospitals and battlefields, and transform them into objects. Ultimately, their studies of diseases and skulls contributed to an understanding of American citizenship that valued whiteness, Christianity, and heroic masculinity defined by violence. Ultimately, as Geller discusses in her talk, a biohistorical study of Morton, his colleagues, and decedents in the cranial collection are instructive about political violence as a throughline in American history and not an aberration.