The Human Sciences
Research and discovery in the human sciences

From 1910 to 1939, Cold Spring Harbor was the site of the Eugenics Record Office. Although many of the ERO records have been transferred elsewhere, the ERO collection in the CSHL archives contains historically significant material on the funding and administration of American eugenics and on the training of eugenics fieldworkers. CSHL’s rare books collection includes a wide range of eugenics manuals, pamphlets, and conference proceedings, as well as many works of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century ethnology. There is additional material related to eugenics in the Charles B. Davenport and Herman J. Muller personal collections, the institutional collection of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and the annual reports of CSHL’s various precursor institutions.
The Reginald G. Harris collection will be of particular interest to historians of the human sciences because it contains expedition notes and photographs from his travels in Central and South America and North Africa. Harris’s documentation of the Kuna people of Panama, including lantern slides and negatives and a sheet of pictographic writing, is particularly noteworthy. Harris’s related publications in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and elsewhere can be found in the CSHL Institutional Repository.

