The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments Presents A New Exhibition - Measurement on the Color Line: Scientific Instruments and the Making of Human Categories
The exhibition will open on October 16, 2026, in the Special Exhibitions Gallery
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., September 16, 2026 —Questions about human difference have been at the core of American society since its founding. Opening at the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard, Measurement on the Color Line: Scientific Instruments and the Making of Human Categories invites visitors to explore how history shaped today’s complex and often contradictory conclusions about race.
Curated by Evelynn M. Hammonds, the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard, the exhibition draws directly from her co-authored book, with Bates College Professor Rebecca Herzing, The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics. Her research highlights how early scientific disciplines, including anthropology and medicine, sought physical justifications for social hierarchies.
“Race is a human invention. We created it; we have used it in ways that have been, in many, many respects, quite negative and quite harmful. And we can think ourselves out of it. We made it; we can unmake it.” – Professor Evelynn M. Hammonds
The exhibition presents a wide range of instruments used by scientists, anthropologists, and medical professionals to measure everything from bones and skin color to lung capacity, sweat glands, and DNA. Artifacts include a nineteenth-century device for measuring skulls called a goniometer, a telegraph key and stopwatch used to measure reaction time, a microtome used to cut cross-sections of hair, skin-tone charts, and a color top manufactured by toy maker Milton Bradley that was repurposed by eugenicist Charles Davenport to quantify skin color. A video in the gallery shows students from Harvard’s Du Bois Scholars Program demonstrating the color top in action.
In addition, the display features visualizations, charts, and historical records, such as census data, that show the extensive efforts made to sort people into fixed categories. An interactive station allows visitors to test their own reaction times.
The exhibition also shines a light on pioneering scholars who challenged these dominant racial ideas:
- James McCune Smith: The first African American physician in the United States, who rigorously debunked Thomas Jefferson’s claims of biological racial differences.
- W. E. B. Du Bois: The first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard, represented by his landmark 1906 study, Health and Physique of the Negro American, originally presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition.
- Caroline Bond Day: A Harvard-trained anthropologist whose research proved that social status and achievement have no correlation with racial ancestry.
- William Montague Cobb: The first African American to earn an MD and PhD in physical anthropology, whose comparative anatomical study of Olympian Jesse Owens debunked myths of racial athletic superiority.
Visitors can trace how measurements of racial differences solidified ideas about race into the twenty-first century, from the decline of eugenics in the 1970s to the emergence of modern genetics and genomics. The display highlights how geneticists shifted from the term “race” to “population,” featuring a Genesis 2000 DNA sequencer as an early technological predecessor to modern mail-in test kits.
The final section of the exhibition offers a contemplative space for visitors to reflect on the exhibition and to watch videos that illustrate the instruments’ functions and feature Dr. Hammonds discussing her work.
Measurement on the Color Line includes objects graciously lent from several institutions and individuals, including the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, the Dittrick Museum of Medical History at Case Western Reserve University, Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College, Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard Divinity School Library, Harvard Law School Library, Houghton Library, and artists Lucy Kim and Wendel White.
About the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments
Harvard has been acquiring scientific instruments for teaching and research since 1672. This collection, established in 1948, is one of the three largest university collections of its kind in the world and contains telescopes, timepieces, computers, optical equipment, and much more.
The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, one of the four Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, is located in Zimmer Hall (formerly the Harvard Science Center) at 1 Oxford Street in Cambridge, just a 6-minute walk across the historic campus from Harvard Square. Admission is free and open to the public Sunday through Friday from 11:00 am–4:00 pm.
About the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture
HMSC connects collections and research at Harvard with global audiences, fostering community and deepening appreciation for science, the natural world, human cultures, and our shared experiences. HMSC works in concert with Harvard faculty, museum curators, students, and members of the extended Harvard community to provide interdisciplinary exhibitions, events and lectures, and educational programs for students, teachers, and the public. HMSC draws primarily upon the extensive collections of the member museums and the research of their faculty and curators.
History
The Harvard Museums of Science & Culture (HMSC) partnership was established on July 1, 2012, by former Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Michael D. Smith, to develop a strong, coordinated public face for the six research museums that are within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard:
See hours and admission rates on each of the HMSC museum websites:
- Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments
- Harvard Museum of Natural History
- Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East
- Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
Press contact:
Bethany Carland-Adams
Public Relations Specialist
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture
617 959 3481
bcarlandadams@hmsc.harvard.edu
Photographs © Tony Rinaldo