Infidel science! Polygenism in the mid-nineteenth-century american weekly religious press

Beginning in 1850 a deluge of articles on the unity of the human race began to appear in many of America's weekly religious newspapers. The writers of these articles reacted to what they perceived as an infidel attack on orthodoxy in two ethnological articles, one authored by Dr. Josiah C. Nott of Mobile, Alabama, and the other by Harvard University's great naturalist Louis Agassiz. Both men attempted to reconcile polygenism--the plural origins of human beings, one for each race--with the Bible by claiming that the human race does not share a unity of descent from Adam and Eve. They were parents of only one of the many human races. The religious weeklies varied in their attitude toward science, but many saw science as an acceptable interest for the pious and promoted the study and practice of various scientific disciplines. At the same time newspaper writers also sought to expose the use of science by infidels--those who actively sought to undermine other people's faith. For two decades the religious weeklies treated preadamist polygenism as an attack on their faith and an episode in their ongoing war on infidelity. Measured by the volume and intensity of the articles in these papers, the unity debate was clearly the most important public controversy involving religion and science in the middle third of the nineteenth century. This dissertation describes the unity debate in America's midnineteenth century weekly religious press, especially exploring the role of rhetoric in this controversy prosecuted in a mass media for lay consumers. This story of the unity debate helps to contextualize the those late nineteenth-century evolution debates by describing the rhetorical forms and techniques designed to deal with threatening science that had been honed in the iii religious press in the decades immediately prior. But this is not about Darwinism. The unity debate ought to stand on its own historiographically just as it did in the mid-nineteenth century, when newspaper stories entitled "The Unity of Man" abounded.