My knowledge of my mother is very scanty, but very distinct. Her personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory. She was tall, and finely proportioned; of deep black, glossy complexion; had regular features, and, among the other slaves, was remarkably sedate in her manners. There is in Prichard's Natural History ojMan, the head of a figure—on page 157—the fea tures of which so resemble those of my mother, that I often recur to it with something of the feeling which I suppose others experi ence when looking upon the pictures of dear departed ones.—Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

Frederick Douglass's citation of James Cowles Prichard's Natural History of Man (1843) is surely one of the best-known representations of reading in the social sciences in the history of American letters. Following Douglass's reference, his own readers have found themselves looking at an etching of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, and have puzzled over what to make of this moment in Dou glass's second published autobiography. While one interpretation considers the gesture as the sign of Douglass's deep ambivalence, perhaps unconscious, over his own genealogy of racial mixture, a more convincing approach reads the pas sage in light of his continuing engagement with the American School of Ethnol ogy. 1 As" The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered"—an address that he delivered approximately a year before the 1855 publication of My Bondage and My Freedom—makes clear, Douglass claimed a historical relationship between ancient Egypt and contemporary descendants of the African diaspora as a way of defying race scientists such as Samuel Morton, George Gliddon, andjosiah Nott,