The Passing of the Great Race is Madison Grant’s 1916 work of racial anthropology, now studied chiefly as a historical document of scientific racism and the eugenics movement. Grant advanced a hierarchical theory of European “races” and warned of supposed racial decline, ideas that influenced immigration policy and were later embraced by Nazi ideologues.
This edition is offered for historical and scholarly study. The book’s pseudo-scientific claims have been thoroughly discredited, but it remains important for understanding the intellectual climate that produced eugenic legislation and racialized anthropology in the early twentieth century. Readers should approach it critically, as evidence of how racial theory was constructed and propagated, not as a reliable account of human variation or history.