Adoption History Project

University of Oregon Professor Ellen Herman has created the first web site on the history of child adoption in the United States. The Adoption History Project is a digital public history resource, profiling people, organizations, topics, and studies that shaped the theory and practice of modern American adoption. Hundreds of images and primary documents illustrate such topics as the orphan trains, infertility, sealed records, eugenics, baby farming, telling, and transracial, international, and special needs adoptions. Designed primarily for people with personal and professional ties to adoption, the site will also be of interest to high school and college teachers who cover child welfare, family life, public policy, and related issues in their history and social studies classes.

The Adoption History Project is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Center for History and New Media. Ellen Herman is the author of The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (University of California Press, 1995) and is currently completing a book, Kinship by Design, about the history of child adoption in the twentieth-century United States.