·S1 E6
Hair Apparent: How Americans Learned to Read Race, Gender & Power in Hair | Sarah Gold McBride
Episode Description
Today, our hair is often a means of self-expression. But what if you had no control over what your hair expressed? And I’m not just talking about a bad hair day! In nineteenth-century America, hair conveyed something very different than what it does today.
In this episode of The Clio Dialogues, I am joined by my friend and former classmate (Go Bears!), historian Dr. Sarah Gold McBride to discuss the surprising American cultural history of hair. She explains that by taking seriously something so ordinary as hair, we can learn much about nineteenth-century ideas about race, gender, nationhood, and belonging.
In This Episode
- Why beards surged in popularity in the mid-nineteenth century
- What facial hair had to do with masculinity, citizenship, and political power
- How racial pseudoscience transformed the beard into a symbol of white male authority
- How Frederick Douglass used his photographed image as a challenge to racist ideas about Black bodies
- How nineteenth-century Americans attempted to “read” bodies
- Bearded women, P. T. Barnum, and anti-cross-dressing laws
- Why hair meant something fundamentally different to nineteenth-century Americans than it does to us today
About the Guest
Dr. Sarah Gold McBride is the author of Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America, and a historian and award-winning Lecturer in the American Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, where her research and teaching focus on the daily lives of ordinary people in the nineteenth-century United States, and the information and objects they found meaningful as they tried to understand race, gender, and national identity.
Buy the Book
Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America
Pre-order the Paperback (available November 17, 2026)
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