Nonfiction
Book
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PUBLISHED
©2025
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343 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm
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The cast of David Kahanamoku -- The gospel of the body -- The "model youth" -- A passion for measuring naked men -- Barbarians and demigods -- "Quite a different man" -- The discovery of nothing -- This was your life!
"In 1920, Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of New York's American Museum of Natural History, traveled to Hawaii on an anthropological research trip. While there, he took a surfing lesson. His teacher was Duke Kahanamoku, a famous surf-rider and budding movie star. For Osborn, a fervent eugenicist, Kahanamoku was a maddening paradox: physically 'perfect,' yet belonging to an 'imperfect' race. Osborn dispatched young scientist Louis Sullivan to Honolulu to measure, photograph, and cast in plaster Kahanamoku and other Hawaiian people. The study touched off a series of events that forever changed how we think about race, culture, science, and the essence of humanity. In Capturing Kahanamoku, historian Michael Rossi draws on archival research and firsthand interviews to weave together a truly fascinating cultural history that is an absorbing account of obsession, a cautionary tale about the subjectivity of science, a warning of the pernicious and lasting impact of eugenics, a meditation on humanity, and the story of a man whose personhood shunned classification."--