Profs & Pints Alameda: A History of American Hair

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “A History of American Hair,” on the meaning and evolution of coiffure in our country, with Sarah Gold McBride, historian and lecturer in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the new book Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America.

[Tickets available only online. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/alameda-hair .]

Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning, and that meaning has changed dramatically over time. Join Sarah Gold McBride, a scholar of the connection between what has grown from our heads and what has gone on inside them, for a fascinating look at our nation’s history as inscribed in bangs, curls, and chops.

We’ll start with the colonial period, when hair was usually seen as bodily discharge and, even, as “excrement.” Then we’ll move on to see how in nineteenth-century America hair took on decisive new significance in a young nation wrestling with its identity. It came to be understood as an integral part of the body, capable of exposing truths about the individuals from whom it grew—even truths that they wanted to hide. It indexed belonging in some ways that may seem strange, as well as others that might seem all too familiar, to people alive today.

You’ll learn how as the United States diversified—intensifying divisions over race, class, citizenship status, and region—Americans sought to understand and classify one another through the revelatory power of hair. They considered its color, texture, length, and even the shape of a single strand in making judgments of others.

While hair styling had long offered clues about one's social status, the biological properties of hair itself gradually came to be seen as a scientific tell. It became viewed as a reliable indicator of whether a person was a man or a woman, Christian or heathen, healthy or diseased, or Black, White, Indigenous, or Asian. Hair was even thought to illuminate aspects of personality, such as whether someone one was courageous, ambitious, or perhaps even criminally inclined.

Dr. Gold McBride will discuss how hair helped many Americans fashion statements about political belonging, engage in racial or gender passing, and reinvent themselves in new cities.

Among the questions she’ll tackle: If hair was a teller of truths, could it also be turned to purposes of deception? (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The sideburns on Union General Ambrose Everett Burnside were something to behold (Library of Congress photo).