Quote:🌞 A harrowing history of a grim chapter in politics and science, in which groups of influential thinkers shaped global policy with the aim of determining who had the right to have children-and who was worthy of life. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read.
For the last two centuries, groups of influential men have, in the professed interest of fiscal responsibility, crime reduction, and outright racism, attempted to control who was allowed to bear children. Their efforts, "eugenics," characterize a movement that over the last century swept across the world-from the US to Brazil, Japan, India, Australia, and beyond-in the form of marriage restrictions, asylum detention, and sterilization campaigns affected millions. German physicians and scientists adopted and then heightened these eugenics practices beginning in 1939, starving or executing those they deemed "life unworthy of...