A wealth of recent historical scholarship has elaborated the complex interaction between scientific concepts of evolution and heredity, and American society and culture. These two books make significant contributions to this broad interdisciplinary area, illuminating the ways in which ideas about organic evolution were contested, and charting the processes by which eugenics acquired an established place in American political and social life.

Clark's focus is on the cultural and intellectual history of evolutionary concepts during the 1920s. Inevitably, the Scopes trial looms large. Yet the structure of Clark's book successfully reorients attention away from this single event, until the penultimate chapter offers a succinct summary of the carnival in Tennessee. Rather, we encounter a broad range of perceptions of evolution, most often encoded in visual images. Clark roams around popular culture, taking in a range of films preoccupied with “man's genesis” (also the title of a 1912 D. W. Griffith film), as well as literature and theatre, where images of cavemen and ape-like human ancestors became recurring tropes, and shaped public perceptions of evolutionary theory.

Yet Clark also devotes considerable space to scientists, in particular the palaeontologist and director of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn. Clark's archival research employs an impressive array of sources documenting Osborn's personal concerns about popular evolutionary imagery, which he feared failed to convey the scientific theory behind the public obsession with monkeys and Neanderthals. Equally, more technical images produced by Osborn and other scientists depicting patterns of evolutionary development also featured prominently in debates over evolution. Embedded in the visual armoury of many scientists was an important moral message: that evolutionary theory could be reconciled to conventional religious pieties and social values, by discerning a progressive teleology in the development of organic life. As Clark notes of Osborn, he “insisted … resolutely on substituting the word ascent for Darwin's term descent of humans” (156–57). The way in which evolutionary theory was conceived mattered for both specialist scientists and nonscientists. William Jennings Bryan, who lambasted the immorality of evolutionary science, realized this as well as Osborn. By looking at both sides of the evolution debates, Clark demonstrates that the drama of the Scopes trial was just one part of a long-lasting contestation over images depicting the place of humanity in nature.

Although Clark's arguments are iterated so frequently as to lead to considerable repetition, the wealth and range of evidence employed is engaging, and clearly establishes the importance of visual culture as a feature of intellectual and scientific controversy. As Clark notes, “The imagination was visual and therefore seductive” (222). Diagrams and illustrations outlining patterns of inheritance advanced the case for evolution effectively – but they also bolstered the authority of eugenics as a science. Indeed, Victoria Nourse echoes Clark in describing the eugenics movement as “an almost irresistible intellectual seduction” (13) which entranced many Americans through much of the first half of the twentieth century.

Nourse's perspective is that of a legal scholar, but her work will be of interest to historians as well. While the Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell (1927) stands out as the major affirmation of the constitutionality of eugenics, Nourse looks in detail at the later case of Skinner v. Oklahoma (1941), and traces its origins in a compelling narrative interwoven with the larger social and political history of the Depression. Like many other states, Oklahoma passed laws permitting the enforced sterilization of convicted criminals and the “feebleminded,” in the collective interests of the “race” at large. When Oklahoma prisoners (including the eventual plaintiff Jack Skinner) found themselves in line for sterilization, they initiated a series of legal challenges which eventually reached the Supreme Court. Nourse's central claim is that the Skinner decision (ruling an Oklahoma sterilization law unconstitutional) was characteristic of legal attitudes of the prewar period, rooted in claims for equal protection under the law, rather than the right of the individual to corporeal autonomy. Legal opposition to sterilization laws did not, Nourse shows, signify opposition to the science of eugenics. As with questions of evolutionary theory in the 1920s, the legitimacy of eugenics was left by lawyers to be determined by its expert practitioners (and policies of sterilization remained in place for decades after Skinner). Rather, the case of Skinner contested the use of state police powers to target a specified social grouping – criminals with records of repeat offending – rather than the whole population equally.

In opening up the details of contemporary views of both eugenics as a science and sterilization as a social policy, Nourse also unravels assumptions about gender, race, and class. Fears over masculinity and virility, miscegenation, and criminality all fed into political support for eugenics. At the same time, confusion over the content of genetic science encouraged the association of behavioural traits (such as repeat offending or low IQ scores) with innate and heritable characteristics. However, Nourse tends to overdetermine the rise of eugenics in the 1930s as a consequence of the economic crash, crime waves, and racial anxieties. As Henry Fairfield Osborn's own efforts had shown, alongside the contributions of his friends Charles Davenport and Madison Grant, scientific and popular versions of eugenics had been common currency for decades. A broader chronological survey might identify the 1930s as a contradictory moment in the history of American eugenics, rather than the time of its “near triumph.” Support for eugenics persisted, yet there was also intensifying scepticism about the implications of implementing eugenic policies. The scepticism was not merely legal: the growing awareness and rejection of Nazi eugenics through the 1930s also played a prominent part in changing American attitudes – but did not end all sterilization programmes.

Together, these studies offer instructive examples of the vexed relationship between scientific knowledge and public policy, particularly where both confront the nature and character of humanity. Evolutionary ideas and images have reoriented many assumptions and philosophies, but they have also been particularly prone to misunderstandings. In these histories of evolution and eugenics, we see how these misunderstandings have stirred up trouble in churches and museums, in schoolrooms and courtrooms, with disruptive and at times destructive consequences.