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Podcast: New Books in American Studies
Episode: Sarah Gold McBride "Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Description: Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the young nation wrestled with its identity. During the colonial period, hair was usually seen as bodily discharge, even âexcrement.â But as Dr. Sarah Gold McBride shows in Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2025), hair gradually came to be understood as an integral part of the body, capable of exposing truths about the individuals from whom it grewâeven truths they wanted to hide.
As the United States diversifiedâintensifying divisions over race, class, cit...