At 3:15pm on Wednesday April 29, 1992, four Los Angeles Police Department Officers won acquittals in their trial after the beating of black motorist Rodney King. Hours after the verdict, violence spread through the city and fires started to ravage the majority-minority neighborhoods of South Los Angeles.
This paper will look at the specific psychiatric interventions that were organized in early May 1992, days after the riots began, by members of the psychiatry and psychosocial clinics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It will discuss their efforts to provide mental health resources to children in over 200 public schools of the Los Angeles United School District in the affected areas. Drawing from the personal papers of the faculty members who led these research-based interventions, this paper will reveal how these psychiatrists defined social psychiatry (Doyle, 2009) as a therapeutic response to environmental-based disorders such as PTSD and critiqued the mainstream biological paradigm (Vallee 2011; Smith, 2008).
Historicizing the long-term focus of psychiatric programs in Los Angeles on urban unrest since the 1965 Watts riots, this paper will also show how racial minorities have long been targeted by medical-based initiatives enforcing the redress of moral order. It will discuss how some psychiatric programs have promoted carceral logics in low-income communities (Edwards-Grossi and Willoughby, 2024), showing a continuity between past psychiatric treatments and the enforcement of penal and social control of racial minorities (Felker-Kantor, 2018; Felker-Kantor, 2024; Rael, 2023; Trevino, 2022) in contemporary US cities.

Following the outbreak of the American Civil War, the American phrenologists Lorenzo Fowler, Lydia Fowler, and Samuel Wells—members of a veritable phrenological empire—looked across the Atlantic for an opportunity to popularize their system of phrenology in the British Isles. Through a series of annual tours that wound through provincial Britain throughout the 1860s, the Fowlers and Wells were able to reignite interest in phrenological science that had been waning since the 1840s. This paper argues that this renewed interest in phrenology resulted in the communication of new, American-inflected ideas of race and nationalism in three British cities: Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester. In each city, the Fowlers and Wells appealed to populations previously less exposed to scientific racist ideas, especially working- and middle-class women. As a result, new conversations around race, difference, and equality emerged within the framework of the Fowler system of phrenology. Just as audiences learned about a new system of phrenology, the popularizers themselves had to learn to adapt to a culture that was, ostensibly, more sympathetic to anti-slavery and ideas of equality. Yet, as will be shown, these ideas of equality were inflected by a deep sense of racial hierarchy reflective of more cynical American ideas of race. Overall, this paper asserts the importance of examining these moments of transnational phrenological popularization as it points to the dynamic system of knowledge represented by the now-discredited science and how the science experienced continued waves of popularity from transnational popularizers throughout the nineteenth century.

Throughout the 19th century, anthropologists in the United States and Europe debated the origin of humanity. Race scientists increasingly rejected monogenism – the singular biblical creation of humanity– and embraced polygenism, dividing human groups into a racialized and distinct hierarchy. Familiar with this literature, Alexander Winchell, a professor at Vanderbilt University proposed in 1878 an unorthodox blending of polygenism, evolutionary theory, and biblical exegesis, arguing that non-white groups predated the biblical Adam. This resulted in his termination. Rather than focus on his censure in the U.S. South, this paper will examine his long-lasting employment at the University of Michigan (1853-1873, 1879-189), arguing for the importance of Michigan – a young and isolated university in the U.S. Midwest – as a node in these transnational networks of race science. Ultimately, Winchell relied on his connections to other prominent race scientists such as Louis Agassiz and the phrenological data of plantation physicians in the U.S. South and British empire to sustain his career in Ann Arbor.

Winchell was a voracious writer and orator, and studying the professor’s publications and lectures in Ann Arbor will make two significant interventions into the history of race science. First, there is relatively little on Winchell’s career outside of Vanderbilt, but his interest in scientific justifications for racial hierarchy both predated and outlasted his brief dalliance in Nashville. Second, , focusing on Winchell in Michigan will demonstrate how his supposedly empirical justification for white supremacy appealed to an almost exclusively white Midwestern university.

Historians of race and medicine are often quick to critique Abraham Flexner for the restrictive impact of his 1910 report on black medical education. However, Flexner's report receives both too much and not enough blame for its role in cultivating anti-black sentiments within the medical profession. Often construed as a magic-bullet that transformed American medical education into its “modern” configuration, my paper shows how Flexner’s report was part of a larger educational reform effort spearheaded by the Carnegie Foundation to reshape American education along eugenic standards that reified and justified social stratification. Although the reforms included stringent requirements for laboratory-based scientific research, clinical training, and additional years of study—changes that were assuredly edifying for students—they provided few therapeutic benefits for patients. Indeed, most practitioners continued offering the same remedies they had before the report was published. Purporting to weed-out the “unfit” under the pretense of academic rigor, these reforms achieved their exclusionary end by raising the cost of medical education until it became prohibitive for large swaths of African Americans, women, immigrants, and the poor to obtain medical credentials. Drawing from the unpublished autobiography of Louis T. Wright, an African American medical student who attended Harvard Medical School in the midst of the reform campaign, my work illustrates how “modern" medicine and other meritorious tropes associated with early-twentieth century reform efforts functioned primarily as metaphors for racial exclusion, masking eugenic standards that normalized white supremacy under the guise of professional “rigor” and “better” medicine.