Whiskerology

A surprising history of human hair in nineteenth-century America, where length, texture, color, and coiffure became powerful indicators of race, gender, and national belonging.Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on new significance as the young nation wrestled with its identity. During the colonial period, hair was usually seen as bodily discharge, even “excrement.” But as Sarah Gold McBride shows, hair gradually came to be understood as an integral part of the body, capable of exposing truths about the individuals from whom it grew.As the United States diversified—and divisions over race, class, and citizenship status intensified—Americans sought to understand one another through the revelatory power of hair. Hair’s biological properties came to be seen as a reliable indicator of whether a person was a man or a woman; Black, white, Indigenous, or Asian; Christian or heathen; healthy or diseased. Hair was even thought to illuminate aspects of personality—whether one was courageous, ambitious, or criminally inclined. Yet hair was also readily turned to purposes of deception in ways that empowered some and alarmed others. Indeed, hair helped many Americans to fashion statements about political belonging, to engage in racial or gender passing, and to reinvent themselves in new cities.A history inscribed in bangs, curls, and chops, Whiskerology illuminates the emergence of hair as an enduring and deeply fraught index of American belonging.