Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte’s Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States.

Join us as we invite Dr. Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, to discuss her new book Pure America and the legacy of the eugenics movement in the American South and beyond.

A Q&A with the author will follow this virtual discussion. You can register for this Zoom program at this link. For questions, please email Chris Fox.

Praise for Pure America: 

"In this grounded, well-rendered, and highly disturbing account, Catte examines the period from the late 1920s to 1979 at the Western State Lunatic Asylum....A well-told, richly contextualized investigation of an appalling episode in American history."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Riveting ... slim but capacious ... tightly argued and impatient."—Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal

"In a lacerating analysis of the links between economic policies and eugenicist thought, Catte examines coerced labor at Virginia’s psychiatric institutions, the destruction of a historically-Black neighborhood in Charlottesville under the guise of urban renewal, and the transformation of Western State into an upscale hotel and condominiums. This provocative and impeccably argued history reveals how traumas of the past inform the inequalities of today." —Publishers Weekly, starred review