Professor Joe Cain publishes blog posts on many subjects related to his research interests.
Francis Galton created a Eugenics Record Office (ERO-Galton) at 88 Gower Street, London, England, in 1904, while developing a scheme to create for himself some research capacity in this area. ERO-Galton operated until 1907, when More…
Charles Darwin lived in number 12 Upper Gower Street between 1839 and 1842, before moving to Down House at the end of summer 1842. (Charles moved into the house on 31 December 1838, spent his More…
In a recent blog post on Lessons About Renaming University Buildings, I developed some key concepts to focus discussions about renaming commemorative objects at universities. The aim was to assist in building a strategy for More…
Summary: The argument builds on several steps. First, naming is a commemorative act. These acts support heritage stories. Conflicts over renaming really are conflicts between heritage stories. These conflicts cannot be resolved by appealing to More…
English Heritage commemorates Charles Darwin with a blue plaque located on Gower Street in Bloomsbury, central London. The “Darwin plaque” is fixed to the Darwin Building, one of the substantial science buildings of University College More…
Colleagues at the University of Puget Sound (UPS) have developed a course to explore the history and legacy of eugenics in their community. This draws on an interdisciplinary team of tutors and some highly energetic students. More…
Francis Galton was a bad piece of work. His racist, nativist, supremacist views are antithetical to UCL’s vision and values. He is no role model for me. He should be no role model for you. More…
The subject of eugenics is back on the agenda for historians of science. I’ve been involved in the UCL Inquiry on the history and legacies of eugenics within that institution. My academic department has reviewed More…
Did Professor Karl Pearson praise Hitler and Nazi ‘race hygiene’ programmes? Yes, he did. He did this in 1934, at a dinner to mark his retirement the previous year from University College London (UCL). Pearson More…
A historian colleague of mine asked if I knew anything about the genealogy of UCL’s first Professor of Chemistry, Edward Turner (1796-1837). My colleague said he had heard a report that Turner was mixed race, More…
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