The Open Boat | Historical Context
Social Darwinism
Every field of thought in the late nineteenth-century was impacted by the theories of Charles Darwin. Although Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, its influence was felt most strongly in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. A variety of thinkers in the social sciences began to apply Darwin's evolutionary theories to explain the development of human societies. Known as the ‘‘Social Darwinists,’’ these thinkers posited the existence of a process of evolution...
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