Samuel Morton was a physician and president of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He's considered the father of American physical anthropology because of his attention to data collection and measurement. The original part of it which is what Morton collected is about 900 craniards. Hour after hour, year after year with painstaking effort, he measured them.
Scientists weren’t the first to divide humanity along racial – and and racist – lines. But for hundreds of years, racial scientists claimed to provide proof for those racist hierarchies – and some still do.
Resources for this episode:
Fatal Invention, by Dorothy Roberts
The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter