Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America by Sarah Gold McBride
Likely enough you’ve heard of phrenology, the Victorian pseudoscience of drawing conclusions about people and their capacities by palpating and measuring their skulls. Less known is that inquiring minds of the period were prone to reading into even more superficial cephalic signs as well. University of California, Berkeley historian Sarah Gold McBride’s new book, Whiskerology, teases out the shifting connotations assigned to hair during a century when the urge to classify and categorize developed into an American cultural obsession, as a young nation in the midst of serious growing pains labored to slot people into their proper places within the social hierarchy. McBride explains that, prior to the nineteenth century, hair was viewed as dead matter, a form of “bodily discharge,” even excrement. Hair presented a hygiene concern, not a political one. But as the U.S. population burgeoned, growing increasingly diverse, hair came to be seen as having far more to say, each strand instilled with a unique power to reveal hidden truths about the individual from whose scalp it sprouted. Not only hairstyle but hair color, texture, volume, quantity, and composition were taken to signal a person’s race, sex, religion, temperament, and more, if only one knew how to interpret the evidence. Hair emerged as an important public marker of social identity as a result—but also a highly suspect one, since easily transformed through trimming, snipping, dyeing, and straightening. Add wigs to the mix and who can be trusted? The possibility that people might be disguising their true identities by means of trichological chicanery gave rise to a new cultural anxiety about epidemic “hair fraud.” Whiskerology is a rich and surprising history of the many meanings of hair, sure to give you more food for thought than the salon’s ratty “vintage” copy of People Magazine the next time you settle into the stylist’s chair.
For the coiffure curious, along with fans of American culture’s weirder quirks, the history of the body, and dubious taxonomies.
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
When I was a child my favorite website was Court TV’s Crime Library, a now defunct clearinghouse for details on all manner of dreadful and tragic activity, with subsections custom-made for the tastes of a young ghoul: serial killers, cannibals, most bizarre. Poring over story after horrible story on the computer at my mother’s work, I found myself well-versed in the atrocities of (primarily) men’s violence against (primarily) women at an early age. But like any glutton I made myself sick with the stuff in time, and these days reading true crime mostly makes me feel terrible; and the bottomless cultural appetite for it – back in vogue courtesy of podcast fever – gives me the creeps. Why are so many of us so enthralled by tales of men terrorizing, brutalizing, and slaying people (again, primarily women)? I have my own ideas as to the answer, none of which give me the warm, fuzzy feelings I’d like to have when contemplating my species. But Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Fraser’s Murderland would seem to be true crime of a different order, with a deeper purpose. The narrative she crafts is less a vehicle for grisly crime scene carnage – though the book doesn’t shy away from the gruesomeness of the crimes it reviews, so readers averse to violence be warned – than it is a survey of the tainted landscapes that gave rise to this country’s most notorious serial killers, grown from American soil like some noxious crop. Fraser directs our attention to the alarming proliferation of serial rapists and murderers produced by the Pacific Northwest in the postwar period, a time and place also notably abundant in massive, unregulated, poison-spewing industrial smelters. Before the EPA began placing limits on emissions from these facilities in the late 1970s and ‘80s, their smokestacks retched up a constant haze of heavy metals over cities like Tacoma, and the people who called them home. People like Ted Bundy, for example, or like Gary Ridgway, the so-called “Green River Killer.” In Murderland, Fraser builds on research suggesting a correlation between lead, a principal constituent of the smelters’ unwholesome exhalations, and violent crime to chalk out her case against extractivism and corporate disregard for life as at least partially culpable for the midcentury serial murder boom. Have men of industry wrought a wasteland overrun by killers? Again, I have my own ideas about the answer, and no, I’m not feeling warm or fuzzy at all.
For true crime enthusiasts (reformed or otherwise) and folks seeking exciting new reasons to fear industrial pollution.
