Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s-1890s

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Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s-1890s is written by Gregory D. Smithers and published by Taylor & Francis US. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0415989779 (ISBN 10) and 9780415989770 (ISBN 13).

This book combines transnational history with the comparative analysis of racial formation and reproductive sexuality in the settler colonial spaces of the United States and British Australia. Specifically, the book places "whiteness," and the changing definition of what it meant to be white in nineteenth-century America and Australia, at the center of our historical understanding of racial and sexual identities. In both the United States and Australia, "whiteness" was defined in opposition to the imagined cultural and biological inferiority of the "Indian," "Negro," and "Aboriginal savage." Moreover, Euro-Americans and Euro-Australians shared a common belief that "whiteness" was synonymous with the extension of settler colonial civilization. Despite this, two very different understandings of "whiteness" emerged in the nineteenth century. The book therefore asks why these different racial understandings of "whiteness" – and the quest to create culturally and racially homogeneous settler civilizations – developed in the United States and Australia.