PUBLIC LAUNCH FOR THE ADOPTION HISTORY PROJECT: JUNE 1, 2003 Visit our website.

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 modern American adoption in theory and practice. 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.

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. She is currently completing a book, Kinship by Design, about the history of child adoption in the twentieth-century United States.