The Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Among the many states with eugenics legislation, Virginia is infamous for its legal campaign to forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck in 1927 and thereby entrench sterilization abuse as the law of the land.

Written by Alexandra Fair. Narration by Dr. Nicholas B. Breyfogle. Video production by Laura Seeger, Cody Patton, and Dr. Nicholas B. Breyfogle. A textual version of this video is available at https://origins.osu.edu/read/steriliz....

This is a production of Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective at the Goldberg Center in the Department of History at The Ohio State University and the Department of History at Miami University. Be sure to subscribe to our channel to receive updates about our videos and podcasts. For more information about Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, please visit origins.osu.edu.

Learn more:

Dorr, Gregory Michael. Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008.

Fields, Karen E. and Barbara Jeanne Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York: Verso, 2012.

Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: New Press, 2011.

Sherman, Shantella. "In Search of Purity: Popular Eugenics and Racial Uplift among New Negroes 1915-1935" (2014). Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research, Department of History. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/history....

“Wangui Muigai” in Projit B. Mukharji, et. Al. “Open Conversations: Diversifying the Discipline or Disciplining Diversity: A Roundtable Discussion on Collecting Demographic Data,” Isis 111 no. 2 (2020): 310-353