Eugenics was the idea created by Francis Galton of creating the perfect race by improving the human gene pool and breeding among the more "desirable" members. For the history and art components of the project, I focused on the environment being a metaphor for eugenics. The English portion was mainly focused on eugenics as a whole and how it affected and affects our society.
Art
For my art portion, I looked at how the environment is a metaphor for eugenics. I represented this idea by splitting my painting into three sections; plague and diseases, manmade disasters, and natural disasters. These areas all are part of the enviroment, which helps to back up the idea of eugenics and the enviroment. An artist that inspired me was Kara Walker, I followed her silhouette style and used her artwork to base some portions of my piece on. The top portion represents the research I did on pandemics in the United States, such as the Spanish Flu. The middle portion represents the bad things that happen that are caused by humans, such as war and wildfires. The bottom portion is showing natural disasters, mainly based off of the Children's Blizzard, which is the last painting. This project includes synthesis by taking two ideas and multiple techniques and fusing them all together.
English
For the English section of my fourth project, I read the informational book "Eugenic Nation" by Alexandra Minna Stern. The book was about eugenics in the United States and also the many aspects on it, such as eugenics in certain areas and how it affected certain groups of people. While reading the book, I kept a log and collected quotes from the book. I later used the quotes from the book to create a poem about the intentions and doings of eugenics. I decided to use these quotes from the book because they showed what eugenics is and what its purpose was to be. This part includes synthesis by taking quotes from a book and turning them into a new product, in this case a poem. I also synthesized the quotes, taking out and combining some words and phrases as well.
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Social Studies
The Social Studies portion of my project was fused into my art, and fueled the idea of the environment being a metaphor for eugenics. I included syntheis by combining multiple topics together to create one big idea. In the top section of my painting, it represents plague. For this, I research different pandemics and disease outbreaks that occured in the United States. One of these events was the Spanish Flu, which occured in 1918. In the first year of the pandemic, the life expectancy in the United States dropped by twelve years. This pandemic had a W shaped mortality rate, which meant that young adults had a higher than expected mortality rate. Many people see eugenics as a pandemic, as it resulted in many people across the country getting sterilized without their consent. For the middle section of my painting, man made disasters is what is shown. Military casualties in the United States are what influenced this area of my piece. The wars in the United States that have the most deaths are the American Civil War, World War ll, and then World War l. I researched each of these events and my painting represents this aspect from the silhouettes of the soldiers. I also researched how humans cause disasters other than war, which is represented by the wildfire since they are mainly caused by man. Eugenics relates to this because it was an idea that was created by man, and one that many thought was a disaster. Finally, the bottom portion of my piece represents natural disasters. The natural disaster that heavily influenced this section was the Children's Blizzard. This natural disaster occured in the U.S. Plains states on January 12, 1888. I read excerpts from a book called "The Children's Blizzard" which gave me a different perspective of what happened and what many people and families went through during that event. This event is a metaphor for eugenics as some believe that creating the perfect human race is just a part of nature. As it can be seen, many historical events in the United States influence the idea that the enviroment is a metaphor for eugenics.