Brown Bag Skulls, Selves, and Showmanship: Itinerant Phrenologists in 19th-Century America 17 January 2018.Wednesday, 12:00PM - 1:00PM Kathrinne Duffy, Brown University

"Come, then, one and all, and learn to know yourselves." With these words, a traveling phrenologist advertised his lecture to the public. Proponents of phrenology — a controversial, influential science — believed that the shape of one’s cranium revealed one’s character. This talk explores the world of phrenological lecture-demonstrations and the circulation of materialist ideas about the self.

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