“Beauty and the Brain is a highly original, insightful, and engaging book. Walker’s research is groundbreaking, her analysis a model for how to produce an intellectual and cultural history, and her chapters filled with compelling evidence. By bringing together science, politics, and popular culture, Walker provides an important history of how people tried to read facial features as a mark of character for both conservative and radical purposes. This book will appeal to specialists in a range of fields including the history of science, women’s history, African American history, literary history, and visual culture.”

Corrine T. Field, University of Virginia

“Beauty and the Brain is an archival gem of a book that sets out the complex and contradictory reasons antebellum Americans—male and female, enslaved and free, Black and white—turned to the popular sciences of phrenology and physiognomy to navigate the roiling currents of their changing social and political worlds.”

Ann Fabian, author of The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead

“In this lively new study of physiognomy and phrenology, Walker demonstrates how an elitist, Enlightenment ‘science of man’ was reshaped by people on the margins—women, African Americans, and a range of social reformers—to demand broader inclusiveness in the new republic. Beauty and the Brain offers a timely and persuasive reexamination of how equality and inequality form the warp and woof of American popular culture.”

Karen Halttunen, author of Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination

“This insightful book charts the resounding appeal of physiognomy and phrenology as forms of knowledge from the founding of the American Republic to the post-Civil War period. Rather than dismissing these sciences as quackery, Walker takes their popularity seriously and skillfully traces the contradictory ways in which they manifested themselves in popular culture and politics.”

Kathy Peiss, author of Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe

"In the early Americas, women and men tolerated many types of contradiction: philosophical, political, legal, financial, spiritual and cultural. In Rachel Walker’s Beauty and the Brain, the author explores just one of these contradictions – that the United States was founded on ideals and ideologies of egalitarianism, but that it protected and promoted gross inequalities of all kinds – through study of the popular sciences of phrenology and physiognomy. Walker shows with skill and insight how early American people deployed these sciences to enforce pre-existing hierarchies and, sometimes, to challenge them."

British Journal for the History of Science