Name: Michael Rossi - "Capturing Kahanamoku"
Start: 2025-12-03T16:00:00-06:00
Location: 5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637

Michael Rossi will discuss his new book "Capturing Kahanamoku". A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op
About the Book: The fascinating untold story of one scientist’s pursuit of a legendary surfer in his quest to define human nature, written with the compelling drama and narrative insight of "Why Fish Don’t Exist" and "The Lost City of Z".
Deep in the archives of New York’s American Museum of Natural History sits a wardrobe filled with fifty plaster casts of human heads and faces that are a century old. How they came to be is the story of one of the most consequential, and yet least-known, encounters in the history of science.
In 1920, the museum’s director Henry Fairfield Osborn traveled to Hawaii on an anthropological research trip. While there, he took a surfing lesson. His teacher was Duke Kahanamoku, a famous surf-rider and budding movie star. For Osborn, a fervent eugenicist, Kahanamoku was a maddening paradox: physically “perfect,” yet belonging to an “imperfect” race.
Upon his return to New York, Osborn’s fixation grew. He dispatched young scientist Louis Sullivan to Honolulu to measure, photograph, and cast in plaster Kahanamoku and other Hawaiian people. The study touched off a series of events that forever changed how we think about race, culture, science, and the essence of humanity.
In "Capturing Kahanamoku", historian Michael Rossi draws on archival research and firsthand interviews to weave together a truly fascinating cultural history that is an absorbing account of obsession, a cautionary tale about the subjectivity of science, a warning of the pernicious and lasting impact of eugenics, a meditation on humanity, and the story of a man whose personhood shunned classification.
A heady blend of "Barbarian Days" and "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", "Capturing Kahanamoku" is a Victorian saga that explores very modern questions about humanity, the noble pursuit of knowledge, and dark compulsions to design nature.
"Capturing Kahanamoku" includes 16-20 black-and-white photos throughout.
About the Author: Michael Rossi is a historian of science and medicine at the University of Chicago and the author of "The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America". He has written for the London Review of Books, Nature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cabinet, among other publications. At the University of Chicago, Rossi is a member of the History Department, the Committee on Historical and Conceptual Studies of Science, and the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics. He lives in Chicago and New York.