During those same decades of dogged journalism and historical investigation into the tragic world of human rights, he has focussed on the arrogance of corporate complicity, academic fraiud, and philanthropic abuse. 'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.For more than a half century, Edwin Black has been researching and writing about the underlying forces that impact human rights. And while modern thinkers have thankfully discarded the pseudo-science of eugenics, such controversial modern issues as human cloning make one wonder how our own era will be remembered a hundred years hence. Black goes on to trace the evolution of eugenic thinking as it evolves into what is now called genetics. Army and the Departments of Labor and Agriculture to organizations with names like the 'American Breeders Association.' Black's detailed research into the history of the American eugenics movement is admirably extensive, but it is in the association between the beliefs of some members of the American aristocracy and Hitler that the book becomes most chilling. The list of groups and agencies conducting eugenics research was long, from the U.S. These 'defective' humans generally ended up being poorer folks who were sometimes categorized as such after shockingly arbitrary or capricious means ! such as failing a quiz related to pop culture by not knowing where the Pierce Arrow was manufactured. Funded and supported by several well-known wealthy donors, including the Rockefeller and Carnegie families and Alexander Graham Bell, the eugenicists believed that the physically impaired and 'feeble-minded' should be subject to forced sterilization in order to create a stronger species and incur less social spending. Although their methods were less violent, the methodology and rationale which the American eugenicists employed, as catalogued in Edwin Black's Against the Weak, were chilling nonetheless and, in fact, influential in the mindset of Hitler himself.

Less notice has historically been given to the American eugenics movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The plans of Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis to create a Nordic 'master race' are often looked upon as a horrific but fairly isolated effort.

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black