“Revisiting Donald Taft’s Two Portuguese Communities in New England"

The lecture is scheduled fo​r Friday​, November 1​3​, 2015 at ​noon in the Dean's Conference Room, College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Building, 820 Broadway Street. ​Parking in Wilder Lot, at the corner of Broadway and Wilder Streets.​

Donald Taft’s 1923 book Two Portuguese Communities in New England caused much anger and protest among New England’s Portuguese communities at the time. This lecture will discuss how and why an obscure academic dissertation became infamous to the point of gathering thousands of people in public demonstrations that demanded a scientific response to the author’s claims. Taft had investigated the possible social causes for the high rates of infant mortality in Fall River, Massachusetts, and Portsmouth, Rhode Island. He used state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative research methods and outlined a number of possible social, cultural, economic and environmental variables related to the poor health indicator. And yet his introduction and conclusion indulged in racialist comments about the Portuguese, serving nutritious social science wrapped in stale racist prejudice. The clash between author and communities helps us access a complex historical moment when the early efforts of promoting the scientific study of society coexisted with the pseudoscience of race in a tense political context regarding immigration.

 

Dr. Frank Sousa

Professor 
Saab-Pedroso Center for Portuguese Culture and Research
University of Massachusetts  Lowell