Tag Archives: race relations

New Book: The Mismeasure of Minds

Michael E. Staub (Baruch College) has published a new volume this month that will be of great interest to our AHP readership. In The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence between Brown and The Bell Curve, Staub assesses research post-desegregation of education in
latter-half of 20th century America, and the interrelationship between the public and institutional uptake of psychological concepts and growing dissatisfaction with IQ as a measure. In doing so, he “charts the paradoxes that have emerged and that continue to structure investigations of racism even into the era of contemporary neuroscientific research.” 

Read the full dust-jacket blurb here at the publisher’s website.

Merton, Mesmerists, and More in JHBS 2010

The first issue of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences for 2010 has just been released online. The winter 2010 issue of JHBS includes four all new articles which explore topics as diverse as mesmerism, race relations, and the golden section, as well as eight book reviews.

In “Merton as Harvard Sociologist: Engagment, Thematic Continuities, and Institutional Linkages” Lawrence Nichols, Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University, examines the importance of the years sociologist Robert Merton (pictured at right) spent at Harvard University. Early intersections of mesmerism and Asian mind-body practices are explored in “The Mesmerists Inquire about “Oriental Mind Powers”: West Meets East in the Search for the Universal Trance,” by David Schmit, of the Department of Psychology at St. Catherine’s University, while in “The Individual and “The General Situation”: The Tension Barometer and the Race Problem at the University of Chicago, 1947-1954″ Leah Gordon, of the School of Education at Stanford University, investigates the triumph of individualistic conceptions of the cause of racial oppression in the post-war United States. In the final article, John Benjafield, Professor Emeritus at Brock University, explores the use of the concept of the golden section in early American psychology. Continue reading Merton, Mesmerists, and More in JHBS 2010