Inventing America's "worst" family : eugenics, Islam, and the fall and rise of the tribe of Ishmael / Nathaniel Deutsch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Deutsch, Nathaniel.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eugenics--United States--History.

Eugenics.

Marginality, Social.

History.

United States.

Marginality, Social--United States--History.

McCulloch, Oscar C. (Oscar Carleton), 1843-1891.

McCulloch, Oscar C.

Physical Description:

xiv, 253 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, [2009]

Summary:

This book tells the stranger-than-fiction story of how a poor white family from Indiana was scapegoated into prominence as America's "worst" family by the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, then "reinvented" in the 1970s as part of a vanguard of social rebellion. In what becomes a profoundly unsettling counterhistory of the United States, Nathaniel Deutsch traces how the Ishmaels, whose patriarch fought in the Revolutionary War, were discovered in the slums of Indianapolis in the 1870s and became a symbol for all that was wrong with the urban poor. The Ishmaels, actually white Christians, were later celebrated in the 1970s as the founders of the country's first African American Muslim community. This bizarre and fascinating saga reveals how class, race, religion, and science have shaped the nation's history and myths.

Contents:

How Oscar McCulloch discovered the Ishmaelites

In darkest Indianapolis

How the other half lives

The Ishmaelites and the menace of the feebleminded

The tribal twenties : Ishmaelites, immigrants, and Asiatic black men

Lost-found nation : how the tribe of Ishmael became "Muslim"

The Ishmaels : an American story.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-241) and index.

ISBN:

9780520255234

0520255232

9780520255241

0520255240

OCLC:

225871898