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Defectives in the Land - Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Paperback)
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Defectives in the Land - Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Paperback)
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Immigration history has largely focused on the restriction of
immigrants by race and ethnicity, overlooking disability as a
crucial factor in the crafting of the image of the "undesirable
immigrant." Defectives in the Land, Douglas C. Baynton's
groundbreaking new look at immigration and disability, aims to
change this. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Baynton explains, immigration restriction in the United States was
primarily intended to keep people with disabilities-known as
"defectives"-out of the country. The list of those included is
long: the deaf, blind, epileptic, and mobility impaired; people
with curved spines, hernias, flat or club feet, missing limbs, and
short limbs; those unusually short or tall; people with
intellectual or psychiatric disabilities; intersexuals; men of
"poor physique" and men diagnosed with "feminism." Not only were
disabled individuals excluded, but particular races and
nationalities were also identified as undesirable based on their
supposed susceptibility to mental, moral, and physical defects. In
this transformative book, Baynton argues that early immigration
laws were a cohesive whole-a decades-long effort to find an
effective method of excluding people considered to be defective.
This effort was one aspect of a national culture that was
increasingly fixated on competition and efficiency, anxious about
physical appearance and difference, and haunted by a fear of
hereditary defect and the degeneration of the American race.
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