Inventing America′s "Worst" Family - Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise fo the Tribe of Ishmael

1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-0-520-25524-1
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 282 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 227 mm, Gewicht: 434 g

This book tells the stranger-than-fiction story of how a poor white family from Indiana was scapegoated into prominence as America's "worst" family by the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, then "reinvented" in the 1970s as part of a vanguard of social rebellion. In what becomes a profoundly unsettling counter-history of the United States, Nathaniel Deutsch traces how the Ishmaels, whose patriarch fought in the Revolutionary War, were discovered in the slums of Indianapolis in the 1870s and became a symbol for all that was wrong with the urban poor. The Ishmaels, actually white Christians, were later celebrated in the 1970s as the founders of the country's first African American Muslim community. This bizarre and fascinating saga reveals how class, race, religion, and science have shaped the nation's history and myths.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Deutsch, Nathaniel

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Islam & Islamische Studien Islam & Islamische Studien
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Sudhir Venkatesh

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. How Oscar McCulloch Discovered the Ishmaelites

2. In Darkest Indianapolis

3. How the Other Half Lives

4. The Ishmaelites and the Menace of the Feebleminded

5. The Tribal Twenties: Ishmaelites, Immigrants, and Asiatic Black Men
6. Lost-Found Nation: How the Tribe of Ishmael Became “Muslim”

7. The Ishmaels: An American Story

Afterword

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Nathaniel Deutsch, Professor of Literature and History at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, is author of The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (UC Press), among other books.