Agassiz’s polygenist views came from anatomists like Samuel Morton using skull measurements.

Evidence

The daguerreotype was a relatively new medium in the 1850s that predated photography as we know it today. Papa Renty’s image was captured on a silver daguerreotype plate, an art form reserved for very wealthy family portraits at the time. Agassiz was a Swiss-born zoologist who studied comparative anatomy in France with Baron Georges Cuvier. His groundbreaking work was in classifying and ordering more than 500 fish species of Brazil and identifying 340 new genera. I continued to read and learned that Agassiz came to the United States in 1846 to take a post at Harvard University, which was where things turned dark. That was when he met Dr. Samuel Morton, a physician and anatomist based in Philadelphia who had published two books using human skulls to prove his theory that “races of mankind had been separately created as distinct and unequal species.” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 156

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Morton’s skull-collection science is the same scientific racism tradition that resurfaces in modern debate about race and measurement.
• QUESTION: How did Morton’s skull data convince Agassiz before he personally encountered enslaved Africans in Charleston in 1850?

Related

• Agassiz’s polygenist theory grew from Morton’s skull-based racial science. (similarity 0.95)
• Polygenesis denied common human ancestry and posited distinct unequal races (similarity 0.83)
• Agassiz commissioned slave daguerreotypes in 1850 to prove whites were a separate superior species. (similarity 0.83)
• Agassiz cataloged enslaved people like zoological specimens for polygenesis research (similarity 0.80)
• Agassiz commissioned the Renty and Delia daguerreotypes in 1850 to support polygenism (similarity 0.80)
• Polygenism claimed racial groups had separate origins and ranked them by skull size. (similarity 0.80)
• Agassiz commissioned the photos of enslaved people as evidence of racial inferiority (similarity 0.80)
• Skull-measuring racial science was fraudulent yet self-confirming (similarity 0.80)
• Agassiz sought African-born slaves in South Carolina as evidence for polygenesis (similarity 0.80)
• Agassiz publicly declared races distinct species in 1850 (similarity 0.79)
• Polygenesis held that each race was created separately as a distinct species (similarity 0.79)
• Agassiz’s polygenist research underwrote racism that outlived scientific racism as a doctrine (similarity 0.79)
• Evidence of Renty’s literacy undermined Agassiz’s polygenist claims. (similarity 0.78)
• Agassiz’s daguerreotypes illustrated polygenesis, the separate-creation theory (similarity 0.78)