Digital Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement

This project proposes to develop a searchable archive of images illustrating the American Eugenics Movement for use by students, educators, and others concerned with the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of human genome research. The Archive will be based primarily on the corpus of rare materials remaining from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which was the epicenter of American eugenics from 1910-40. These materials have been heretofore essentially inaccessible- some remaining in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Research Archives and the bulk coming to rest within the last several years at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. The digital Archive will include photographs of eugenics researchers and caseworkers, exhibits from eugenic congresses and fairs, case materials and pedigrees from family studies, title pages and tables from monographs, and brief items from the Eugenical News and other publications.