Website illuminates the dark history of eugenics in 20th-century U.S.

UCLA College Division of Humanities | September 11, 2026

This article was adapted with permission from Dartmouth News.

An innovative new website, Eugenic States: A Contextual Archive, uses digital storytelling to preserve and illuminate a disturbing and largely unknown chapter in U.S. history.

Work on the project was led by Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of the UCLA College Division of Humanities and a professor of English and history; Jacqueline Wernimont, distinguished chair of digital humanities and social engagement at Dartmouth College; and history scholar Gianna May Sanchez. Representing decades of research, the website is designed to be an accessible resource for general readership about the eugenics movement and its effects.

Alexandra Minna Stern

During the 20th century, more than 60,000 people in the United States were sterilized based on state eugenics laws. Very few were asked whether they wanted the procedure — instead, they were coerced or forced. The laws that enabled this to happen, passed in 32 states, aimed to shape and limit populations through reproductive control, giving doctors and state officials the power to decide who was “fit” to have children. 

Those eugenics laws — in place from the early 1900s through the 1970s — mainly targeted patients in state asylums and hospitals.

Ableism — prejudice or discrimination against people with physical, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities — was “the foundational idea behind eugenic sterilization, and then of course it was compounded by racism and xenophobia,” said Stern, who has been studying the history of eugenics for 30 years and wrote the award-winning book “Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America” (University of California Press).

Those who were sterilized were, for the most part, “poor people, people of color, immigrants, and people seen as non-normative, in terms of gender or sexuality,” Stern said. “People should know about this and realize it’s a part of our history, and that it affected real people whose futures were irrevocably changed.”

Eugenic States was funded in part by a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The site builds on previous work by Stern and Wernimont, including Eugenic Rubicon, a website focused on eugenics in California that launched in 2017, also with NEH support.

A 2003 Los Angeles Times article covered Gov. Gray Davis’ apology for California’s decades-long sterilization policy in the early 20th century.

The new website highlights themes in the history of eugenics, such as disability, medicine and expertise; race and immigration; and courts and the law. It includes in-depth resources on California, North Carolina and Iowa, where nearly half of the known legal sterilizations took place. News and magazine articles, letters and archival images provide historical context about the era in which eugenic ideas flourished. From the color palette to how it interacts with screen-reading technology, the site is designed to be as accessible as possible, May Sanchez said.

While Eugenic States focuses on the past century, its creators are quick to emphasize its relevance today. The site features an array of data stories that bring the material to life. One, based on records from Iowa, offers a stark illustration of how behaviors such as alcohol and drug use and violence were used to justify sterilization. 

Others depict what Wernimont calls “the empowering narratives” that emerged as they worked with the data. For example, the number of sterilizations varied wildly from state to state, county to county, and even among institutions, depending on the inclinations of individual hospital superintendents. 

“We are telling the story of it happening in the past, but this isn’t history,” Wernimont said, noting that the discredited “science” has lately seen renewed activity, prompting a guiding question. “How do we tell the story in a way that doesn’t just make people aware of the gravity of the situation, but also what they could do should something like this come up again?”

‘Justice-oriented work’

As they worked on the website, the researchers grappled with how to demonstrate the scale and impact of eugenics in the U.S. without visiting harm on people who were sterilized and their families. 

They met with educators, community-engaged scholars, people from impacted communities, disability justice organizations, archivists, and others with experience in considering historical harms. Their conversations included the website’s possible uses and impacts.

“Justice-oriented work that thinks about impacted communities has to happen in consultation with communities,” Wernimont said. 

Ultimately, Eugenic States sheds light on the laws that enabled the sterilizations, the justifications officials used to recommend the procedures and the organizations that carried those out.