This virtual issue, organized by contributing editor Channah Leff and managing editor Sean Mallin, brings together articles published in American Anthropologist around race and biology, focusing on genetics as one way to understand—and counter misunderstandings about—human difference. From early work on immigration and evolution to more recent work on epigenetics, anthropologists have been at the forefront of conversations about what race is—and what it isn’t. These conversations are as important as ever, given the rise of new ethno-nationalisms and biological essentialisms, and the increasing use of genetic testing to bolster identity claims.

These articles reflect how anthropologists have addressed questions about race and evolution, genes and human behavior, and culture and biology, as well as how their interventions have changed over the past hundred years.

The entire issue is available here. Articles will be free to access until the end of 2018.

Boas, Franz. 1912. “Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants. ”

Garn, Stanley M. 1957. “Race and Evolution.”

Montagu, Ashley. 1962. “The Concept of Race.”

Livingstone, Frank B. 1968. “Anthropological Implications of Sickle Cell Gene Distribution in West Africa.”

Washburn, Sherwood L. 1963. “The Study of Race.”

Jackson, Linda. 1986. “Sociocutural and Ethnohistorical Influences on Genetic Diversity in Liberia.”

Lieberman, Leonard, and Fatimah Linda C. Jackson. 1995. “Race and Three Models of Human Origin.”

Keita, Shomarka O. Y., and Rick A. Kittles. 1997. “The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence.”

Mukhopadhyay, Carol C., and Yolanda T. Moses. 1997. “Reestablishing ‘Race’ in Anthropological Discourse.”

Cartmill, Matt. 1998. “The Status of the Race Concept in Physical Anthropology.”

Templeton, Alan R. 1998. “Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective.”

Caspari, Rachel. 2003. “From Types to Populations: A Century of Race, Physical Anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association.”

Hawks, John, and Milford H. Wolpoff. 2003. “Sixty Years of Modern Human Origins in the American Anthropological Association.”

Jones, Doug. 2003. “Kinship and Deep History: Exploring Connections between Culture Areas, Genes, and Languages.”

O’Rourke, Dennis H. 2003. “Anthropological Genetics in the Genomic Era: A Look Back and Ahead.”

Armelagos, George J., and Dennis P. Van Gerven. 2008. “ A Century of Skeletal Biology and Paleopathology: Contrasts, Contradictions, and Conflicts.”

Armelagos, George. 2012. “Anthropology and the Genographic Project.”

Goodman, Alan H. 2013. “Bringing Culture into Human Biology and Biology Back into Anthropology.”

Marks, Jonathan. 2014. “Commentary: Toward an Anthropology of Genetics.”

Fuentes, Agustín. 2015. “Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution.”

Thayer, Zaneta M., and Amy L. Non. 2015. “Anthropology Meets Epigenetics: Current and Future Directions.”

Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O., Wagner, Jennifer K., Yu, Joon-Ho, Harrell, Tanya M., Bamshad, Michael J., and Charmaine D. Royal. 2017. “Qualitative Analysis of How Anthropologists Interpret the Race Construct.”

Gokcumen, Omer. 2018. “The Year in Genetic Anthropology: New Lands, New Technologies, New Questions.”

Vital Topics Forum on Anthropological Genetics