The Human Race
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in the intellectual history of anthropology and nineteenth-century scientific writing
- Students and researchers studying the formation of modern European racial thought
- Readers who enjoy panoramic natural-history description and can accept the language of old texts
- University faculty and students needing free public-domain English historical sources for research
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking authoritative conclusions and the latest research in contemporary anthropology
- Those sensitive to nineteenth-century racial classification discourse and unwilling to read old texts
- General readers who struggle with English and need fluent modern translations
Reading tips
- Begin with the introduction and table of contents to grasp the book's classificatory framework, then closely read the chapters relevant to your own research.
- While reading, note the author's sources and grounds for judgment, distinguishing factual description from period bias.
- Read alongside a contemporary general history of anthropology to see how disciplinary ideas have changed over more than a century.
- When encountering unfamiliar old natural-history terms in the English original, infer from context first rather than looking up every word.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
Louis Figuier (1819–1894) was a French popular science writer whose biographical details remain limited in publicly available sources. Seven of his works are held here, spanning the sea, insects, reptiles and birds, human races and primitive humans, and the future life after death, showing that he excelled at presenting natural science to general readers. Representative works such as The Ocean World, The Insect World, Primitive Man and The Human Race are largely descriptive accounts of species and natural phenomena, combining information with readability; he also wrote a historical play, Gutenberg. Overall, his writing joined popular science with literary narrative and had a certain influence on the spread of natural knowledge to the public in the nineteenth century.
