Clio's Review: Whiskerology

Sarah Gold McBride, Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2025).

What can something as ordinary as hair tell us about nineteenth-century America? As Sarah Gold McBride demonstrates in Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America – quite a lot. In this fascinating and deeply researched cultural history, McBride argues that nineteenth-century Americans understood hair not merely as something attached to or adorning the body, but as an actual body part.

And not just any old body part, but one capable of revealing fundamental truths about race, gender, character, and national belonging.

Organized around long hair, facial hair, hair science, and hair as a means of disguise and deception, Whiskerology traces how Americans invested an extraordinarily malleable part of the human body with remarkably stable meanings. Beards became assertions of masculinity and white political authority; hair texture and color became fodder for racial classification; wigs and false beards raised anxieties about authenticity and criminality. Yet hair’s very malleability also offered opportunities to manipulate how others read the body.

One of the great strengths of Whiskerology is Gold McBride’s willingness to take seemingly strange historical claims seriously on their own terms. Rather than dismiss nineteenth-century ideas about hair as simply absurd, she asks what they reveal about how Americans understood bodies and the identities attached to them. The result is a significant work of scholarship that is also tremendously fun to read. Gold McBride moves easily between serious analysis and wonderfully unexpected evidence, demonstrating precisely why cultural history matters: seemingly ordinary things can expose the assumptions through which people make sense of their world. It is a book I thoroughly enjoyed and enthusiastically recommend.

Watch or listen to my conversation with Sarah Gold McBride on The Clio Dialogues, then pick up a copy of Whiskerology. And don’t be surprised if it gives you pause the next time you consider changing your own hairstyle.