Oneida stirpiculture

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The stirpiculture experiment at the Oneida Community was the first positive eugenics experiment in American history, resulting in the planned conception, birth and rearing of 58 children. The experiment lasted from 1869–1879. It was not considered as part of the larger eugenics history because of its radical religious context.^[1] The term "stirpiculture" was used by John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, to refer to his system of eugenics, or the breeding of humans to achieve desired perfections within the species. Noyes derived stirpiculture from the Latin word "stirps", which means "stock, stem, or root" (Carden). It has been claimed that Noyes coined the term two decades before Francis Galton created the term "eugenics".^[1] In 1904, Galton claimed that he had first come up with the term and "deliberately changed it for eugenics,"^[2] a claim supported in print by George Willis Cooke.^[3] In his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, Galton noted that his new term "eugenics" was a suitable replacement for the older term "viriculture" that he had invented, suggesting that he had confused the two terms "viriculture" and "stirpiculture."^{[4][citation needed]}