Insuring Life: Hoffman, Reconstruction and the Making of the Statistic Individual (with Megan Wolff and Dan Bouk)

Megan Wolff, Chair of Mental Health Policy at DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College joins the WBI show alongside Dan Bouk, Associate Professor of History at Colgate University and author of How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Dan researches the history of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness. His work investigates the ways that corporations, states, and the experts they employ have used, abused, made, and re-made the categories that structure our daily experiences of being human. 

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Host: J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Ilan Mandel
Music: Drew Lewis

Links for the Episode:
The Myth Of The Actuary: Life Insurance And Frederick L. Hoffman's Race Traits And Tendencies Of The American Negro
A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1
Fact Sheet: The Impact of Pandemic Disease on Mental Health
Life Insurance And COVID-19: All You Need To Know
Medicalizing Blackness | Rana A. Hogarth | University of North Carolina Press
The Health and Physique of the Negro American
Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media By Jacqueline Wernimont
The Emotional Epidemiology of H1N1 Influenza Vaccination 
The Condemnation of Blackness — Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Recommendations:
Megan: “The Birchbark House” Series by Louise Erdrich
Dan The Beautiful Bureaucrat — Helen Phillips, 
The Need — Helen Phillips,
Census Stories, USA | Reading the stories in the data.