[A German racist and an ardent Russophobe.] Miners K. Comparison of old and new Russia, taking into account the ...

[A German racist and an ardent Russophobe.] Miners K. Comparison of old and new Russia, taking into account the natural characteristics of the inhabitants... In two volumes. Volumes 1-2. / 1798 in German.
Leipzig. [Leipzig.] Publishing house in John. Beniamin Georg Fleischer. [J. B. Georg Fleischer.] 1798 - VIII, 348 p., IV, 368 p. Hard cardboard binding of the epoch, tinted in red three-sided sawn-off, verger paper, slightly reduced format (12.5 x 20.5 cm).

Excellent preservation for its age, extinguished seals (on the back of the title page, on page 17 and on the last page), stamped ex-libris on the back of the title page.

Full title: Vergleichung des ältern und neuern Russlandes, in Rücksicht auf die natürlichen Beschaffenheiten der Einwohner, ihrer Cultur, Sitten, Lebensart und Gebräuche... Nach Anleitung älterer und neuerer Reisebeschreiber.

Miners Christoph. Comparison of old and new Russia, taking into account the natural characteristics of the inhabitants, their culture, customs, lifestyle and customs, as well as the constitution and administration of the empire. According to the instructions of old and later travelers.

The only and lifetime edition.

Christoph Meiners (July 31, 1747 – May 1, 1810) was a German racist, philosopher, historian and writer, born in Warsaw. He supported the polygenist theory of the origin of man. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.

He is now known mainly for his critical attitude towards Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft and the concept of Enlightenment. Later he became the favorite intellectual ancestor of the Nazis. He considered Negroes, Indians, Slavs, residents of the Middle East and Asia to be inferior races. It is to him that we owe the birth of myths that the Slavs can eat fly agarics with impunity and bake sick people in stoves, so that they can then happily dump them in the snow.

However, this did not prevent Professor Miners from recruiting professors to Moscow University at the invitation of the University trustee M.N. Muravyev. As an official award, Meiners was twice awarded a diamond ring from the emperor, and in December 1803 he was one of the first to be elected an honorary member of Moscow University.

Meiners was a polygenist: he believed that each race has a separate origin. He was a very early proponent of scientific racism. Miners studied the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of each race and constructed a hierarchy of races based on evidence that was considered common in scientific and anthropological circles at the time. Miners divided humanity into two parts, which he called the `beautiful white race` and the `ugly black race'. In Meiners` book An Essay on the History of Mankind, he argued that the main characteristic of a race is either beauty or ugliness. He considered only the white race beautiful. He considered the ugly races inferior, immoral, and animal-like. He argued that black ugly peoples differ from white beautiful peoples by a sad lack of virtue and terrible vices.