The Child as Evolutionary Dilemma in 19th-Century US Thinking

19th century historian John Fiske believed that the "enigma" of childhood could unlock a new theory of evolutionary theory as transcendental doctrine. In his works, he focused on ideas of long versus short childhoods as grounds for a temporal and performance based understanding of race. This paper explores his theory of childhood and his conversations with peers of his time, seeking to understand how, contrary to ideas of race as biologically fixed, childhood opened up a way of seeing racial difference as temporal and political--a para-eugenic project that nonetheless condemned those with "bad childhoods" (which they saw as both biology and culture) to ahistoricity. Understanding Fiske's work on this sheds new light on histories of U.S. race science and its connection to political development--as Fiske was, by many, considered the pre-eminent U.S. political historian of his time.