Typecasting: On the Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality

"Typecasting is merely the most lucid and instructive history book to be published in the new millennium. "
-Kurt Vonnegut, author of A Man Without a Country

"In Typecasting, two ace historians offer a profound and sweeping study of the most everyday, often unconscious, forms of prejudice. [It's] bound to make you think-and think again. "

- Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bait and Switch

- Investigating the practice of science in the service of prejudice, Ewen & Ewen bring to life the dark history of the Age of Democracy, where every step toward equality has found a parallel retreat into hierarchical dogma:

• In 1776, as some American colonials proclaimed that all men are created equal, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, court physician to England's King George III, subdivided humanity into five unequal categories.

• Early-twentieth-century socialist and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger saw one of birth control's potential uses as being a tool for curbing the procreation of "socially degenerate" populations: those "unfit" for democracy.

• In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University suggested "issues of intrinsic aptitude" were to account for the underrepresentation of women in the sciences and mathematics.

In this monumental work of popular history, Ewen & Ewen vividly expose the pivotal developments that have made stereotypes a persistent, common language. Moving across centuries and continents in thirty eloquent vignettes, their extraordinary journey uncovers the incubation of modern stereotypes in the halls of science and aesthetics and traces their materialization in the popular imagination. Their detective work in museum archives, popular magazines, and film alike, uncovers how stereotype has served as the groundwork of power in the modern world.