Email: michael.mezzano@bc.edu

Office: Maloney Hall, Room 430

Education:

Ph.D. in History, Boston College

Research Interests

I am an intellectual and cultural historian of the United States, from the Age of Darwin through the 1950s. I am ultimately interested in how ideas achieve efficacy - how they translate from the realm of abstract thought to influence values, policies, and other developments. Ideas are also highly movable, and my interests include integrating the history of American ideas in the larger historical developments of Western civilization.

My current project is a revision of my dissertation for publication.  It examines the role racial nativism played in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries in reversing American immigration policy from an "open door" to a highly selective one. As a complex set of beliefs and ideas, racial nativism suggested that some groups of people were biologically superior to others, and therefore had to be protected from what was sometimes called, in the language of the time, the "socially inadequate classes." A central component of the project is the simultaneous development of the "biological revolution" in the hard sciences of biology, zoology, and genetics, which called into question many of the eugenic and nativist claims of supporters of restriction. This tension between these two "sciences"  - one deriving from the tradition of Natural History, the other from experimental research by professionally trained scientists and academics - provides a perfect case study to see why some ideas "mattered" more than others.