Research & Coffee Featuring Mark A. Brandon, M.A.

Research and Creative Coffee is a series of events aimed to be a platform for discussions about publications, projects and working papers of AAU Faculty as well as AAU students.

The upcoming event planned for April 24th, starting at 1.30 pm, online, will be devoted to the research paper: “The Last Great Biological Reserve of the White Race: An American Immigrant’s Racial Understanding of the Soviet Union”, by Mark A. Brandon, M.A. As the discussants of the paper, we will welcome Prof. PhDr. Milada Polišenská, CSc., AAU, and Prof. RNDr. Ivo Budil, Ph.D., DSc., Metropolitan University Prague.

This event is open to the public but please note only registered participants will receive a link to the online event and the full paper. Registration Deadline: April 23rd @ 12pm.

Abstract of the paper:

This talk, which is based on original archival research, will focus on Aleš Hrdlička’s racial interpretation of the Soviet Union. The Czech-American scientist Aleš Hrdlička (1869–1943) was the Curator of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution from 1910 to 1941 and a founding father of American physical anthropology. Although there is a significant amount of specialist literature about Hrdlička, his admiration for the Soviet Union is a theme that has never been explored until now. In the 1930s, Hrdlička enthusiastically promoted the Soviet Union in America, but for all the “wrong” reasons. Entirely uninterested in Communist ideology, he regarded the Soviet Union as the home of the Slavs, who were, in his view, the largest, healthiest, and most fertile branch of the white race. In the opening days of World War II, he argued that the Slavs, not the Germans, would ultimately prove the fittest race in the struggle for survival. Hrdlička also predicted that the rapidly reproducing Slavs would numerically bolster the white race against the so-called “rising tide of color.” This is why, in a talk in Czechoslovakia in 1923, he called the Slavs, “the last great biological reserve of the white race.”