I’ll admit: Having grown addicted to the treats of literary nonfiction, I don’t make it through too many academic histories these days. If I’m going to, there’d better at least be a decent lede—and the Marxian opening to a new history of the eugenics movement in Texas fits the bill.
“Monsters haunted the imaginations of some of the most educated white Texans from the 1850s to the dawn of World War II,” tees off The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas, a 300-page (endnotes included) work by husband-wife historians Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf.
Philips, who recently retired from a teaching position at the University of North Texas in Denton, previously authored White Metropolis, a well-regarded history of race in Dallas.
