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Podcast: Plausibly Live - The Dave Bowman Show
Episode: DDH - The Eugenics Wars
Description: One of the least discussed and acknowledged periods in US History got its start on March 11, 1880, with the birth of the man, Harry L. Laughlin, who would be among the driving figures in the eugenics movement in the United States. The ideas for which he would advocate included sterilization and would not actually end until well into the 1970s. It all sounds good on the surface – to improve humans through genetics.
Today we tend to think of these ideas as the stuff of Nazi history and dystopian science fiction. The hard realization though is that these ideas – that...