Faculty of Arts and Sciences

An innovative new website, Eugenic States: A Contextual Archive, uses digital storytelling to preserve and illuminate a disturbing and largely unknown chapter in U.S. history.

During the 20th century, more than 60,000 people in the United States were sterilized based on state eugenics laws. Very few were asked whether they wanted the procedure—instead, they were coerced or forced. The laws that enabled this to happen, passed in 32 states, aimed to shape and limit populations through reproductive control, giving doctors and state officials the power to decide who was "fit" to have children. 

Eugenic States was created by Jacqueline Wernimont, Distinguished Chair, Digital Humanities and Social Engagement; history scholar Gianna May Sanchez; and UCLA English professor Alexandra Minna Stern. Representing decades of research, the website is designed to be an accessible resource for general readership about the eugenics movement and its effects.

The eugenics laws—in place from the early 1900s through the 1970s—mainly targeted patients in state asylums and hospitals.

Ableism—prejudice or discrimination against people with physical, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities—was "the foundational idea behind eugenic sterilization, and then of course it was compounded by racism and xenophobia," says Stern, who has been studying the history of eugenics for 30 years. 

Those who were sterilized were, for the most part, "poor people, people of color, immigrants, and people seen as non-normative, in terms of gender or sexuality," she says. "People should know about this and realize it's a part of our history, and that it affected real people whose futures were irrevocably changed."

Eugenic States builds on previous work, including Eugenic Rubricon, a website focused on California that Wernimont and Stern launched in 2017 with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

The new website highlights themes in the history of eugenics, such as disability, medicine, and expertise; race and immigration; and courts and the law. It includes in-depth resources on California, North Carolina, and Iowa, where nearly half of the known legal sterilizations took place. News and magazine articles, letters, and archival images provide historical context about the era in which eugenic ideas flourished. From the color palette to how it interacts with screen-reading technology, the site is designed to be as accessible as possible, May Sanchez says.

While Eugenic States focuses on the past century, its creators are quick to emphasize its relevance today.

"We are telling the story of it happening in the past, but this isn't history," Wernimont says, noting that the discredited "science" has lately seen renewed activity, prompting a guiding question. "How do we tell the story in a way that doesn't just make people aware of the gravity of the situation, but also what they could do should something like this come up again?"

"Justice-oriented work"

As they worked on the website, the researchers grappled with how to demonstrate the scale and impact of eugenics in the U.S. without visiting harm on people who were sterilized and their families. 

They met with educators, community-engaged scholars, people from impacted communities, disability justice organizations, archivists, and others with experience in considering historical harms. Their conversations included the website's possible uses and impacts.

"Justice-oriented work that thinks about impacted communities has to happen in consultation with communities," Wernimont says. 

Ultimately, Eugenic States sheds light on the laws that enabled the sterilizations, the justifications officials used to recommend the procedures, and the organizations that carried those out.

"Part of what we are interested in, overall, in the project is, who is responsible?" Wernimont says. 

The researchers had wanted to include patients' voices and experiences, but those were absent from the available documents—primarily bureaucratic records.

"The records were not necessarily true and accurate representations of the people," Wernimont says. "What they were, instead, was a true and accurate representation of how a physician or a nurse or a warden wanted to represent a case."

In related research, Wernimont; Carly Bobak, Guarini '21, director of research engagement and data science in Research Computing and Data at Information, Technology, and Consulting at Dartmouth; and Jane Huang '25 had previously analyzed thousands of sterilization recommendations, looking closely at the language doctors used to describe their patients. They presented their findings, Visual Narratives: Sexual Stigma in Physician Notes From American Eugenics Records, at the 2024 Outlier conference for data visualization experts and data journalists.

The power of data visualization

Working in collaboration with Wernimont's Digital Justice Lab and the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, the researchers developed data stories to bring the material to life.

"Numbers are unfathomable," says Bobak, who created many of the data stories featured on the website. "We don't have an inherent human connection to numbers, and that's where visualization becomes so critical."

One data story, based on records from Iowa, offers a stark illustration of how behaviors such as alcohol and drug use and violence were used to justify sterilization. 

Others depict what Wernimont calls "the empowering narratives" that emerged as they worked with the data. For example, the number of sterilizations varied wildly from state to state, county to county, and even among institutions, depending on the inclinations of individual hospital superintendents. 

"Sometimes people write about eugenics as a narrative about the whole country being a mess, but that isn't true; rather, key players made an outsized impact," Wernimont says. "Additionally, we know from historians that there were lots of people who pushed back."

And while there was a larger system that made the sterilizations possible, putting political pressure or even oversight pressure on linchpin actors within that system "could literally change the course of history and thousands of lives," she says. "That, to me, actually feels really hopeful."

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Other Dartmouth contributors to the website include John Bell, program director of the Dartmouth Resources for Emerging Arts and Media Studio; Caroline Casey '21; Brinker Ferguson, a lecturing professor in Native American and Indigenous Studies; Jane Huang '25; and Kirby Phares '21.