哥廷根历史学派是由18世纪末期哥廷根大学里一群使用一种特定的史料编纂手法的史学家组成的学派[1]。哥廷根历史学派的史学家们曾想要将让·马比荣的批判方法与伏尔泰、爱德华·吉本等哲学历史学家的方法结合起来,写就一部普遍历史[2]。
该学派的史学家们首创了科学种族主义的两组基本术语:
- 约翰·弗里德里希·布卢门巴赫和克里斯托夫·迈纳斯提出了用于指代种族的颜色术语:高加索人种,即白种人;蒙古人种,即黄种人;马来人种,即棕种人;尼格罗人种,即黑人;美洲原住民,即红种人;[3]
Gierl, Martin. https://books.google.com/books?id=XtV2nJcVolQC&pg=PA285. Change of Paradigm as a Squabble between Institutions. BRILL. 3 May 2013: 285. ISBN 978-90-04-24391-0. The term “Göttingen school of history" refers not to student-teacher relations nor to a shared methodology, but precisely to this field of competition in historical, cultural and anthropological interpretation, which emerged in Göttingen in the second half of the eighteenth century as an institutional effect of the Göttingen university, and which is captivating not for its shared attitude, but for its vigorous activity emanating from all of the university’s areas of expertise in all areas of contemporary cultural-historical debate – which, as a political and cultural identity debate, was at the centre of discourse in the late Enlightenment.
Iggers, Georg. The Theory and Practice of History: Edited with an Introduction by Georg G. Iggers. Routledge. 1 November 2010: 19. ISBN 978-1-136-88292-0. There had developed in the eighteenth century at the University of Göttingen a school of historians, including Johann Christoph Gatterer, August Ludwig Schlozer and Arnold Hermann Heeren, who combined the critical method of erudite scholars like Mabillon with the concern of the philosophic historians of the eighteenth century, such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who sought to write universal history without a strict critical evaluation of their sources. Niebuhr and Ranke refined the concern with critical method, Ranke in the process narrowed the universality of the outlook of the Göttingen historians. What Ranke brought to history was less a new method – this had been developed to a great extent by the Göttingen school – than a greater emphasis on the professional and technical character of history and a conception of history that we shall discuss later in this Introduction.
The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza, pg 124, 1995, "Blumenbach's classification had a lasting influence in part because his categories neatly broke down into familiar tones and colors: white, black, yellow, red, and brown."