author
Lothrop Stoddard
1883–1950
A controversial early 20th-century American writer and historian, he became widely known for books that promoted eugenics and racist theories. His work was influential in its day and is now mainly read as part of the history of pseudoscience, white supremacy, and anti-immigration thought.
2 Audiobooks
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy
by Lothrop Stoddard
The New World of Islam
by Lothrop Stoddard
About the author
Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on June 29, 1883, Theodore Lothrop Stoddard was the son of travel writer and lecturer John Lawson Stoddard. He studied at Harvard and later earned a Ph.D. in history there, going on to write on world politics, empire, and race.
Stoddard published several widely discussed books in the 1910s and 1920s, including The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy and The Revolt Against Civilization. He also worked as a journalist and commentator, but his reputation rests largely on his advocacy of eugenics, Nordicism, and so-called scientific racism.
Today, Stoddard is remembered less as a serious historian than as an example of how racist and exclusionary ideas were presented as scholarship in the early 20th century. He died in Washington, D.C., on May 1, 1950.