Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America

Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America

Gold McBride, Sarah

Paperback

Black American History19th Century United States HistoryGeneral Gender Studies

PREORDER - Expected ship date November 17, 2026

ISBN10: 0674306120
ISBN13: 9780674306127
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: Nov 17 2026
Pages: 304
Language: English

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.

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