Counter‐science: African American historians and the critique of ethnology in nineteenth‐century America

The intersections between social and scientific definitions of race were never so con‐spicious nor so consequential as in the nineteenth century. And never was this more true than when such definitions were made to apply to African Americans. We have a scholarship of considerable depth detailing the ways in which African Americans were subjected to the terms of racial science; we need now to ask how those terms were resisted, by whom, and through which rhetorical resources. This essay examines how postbellum African American historians contested racial science and constructed a rhetoric of vindication by appropriating certain scientific claims even as they asserted extra‐scientific grounds for full citizenship rights.