The wave of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century had significant repercussions for America’s nativist racial hegemony. According to Jean and John Comaroff (1991), hegemony and ideology exist along a continuum of beliefs, ranging from the dominant and imperceptible (hegemony), to the discernable and debated (ideology). Before the 1890s, two related nativist assumptions were implicitly accepted as part of America’s hegemony: race is biological, and northwestern Euro-American dominance is natural. When millions of southern and eastern Europeans immigrated to the US around the 1890s, these hegemonic assumptions were called into question, and gradually moved into the realm of the ideological. To maintain their privilege, nativists used the ideology of scientific racism to argue that their northwestern European racial biology made them superior, thus situating their dominance in immutable nature. The American Museum of Natural History, which was run by men of northwestern European descent, is an important site to study the country’s cracking hegemony. Through its collections and exhibitions (consisting mostly of unethically-sourced human remains and cultural artifacts), the museum participated in the ideological production of scientific justifications to keep various groups, such as immigrants from “lesser” races, on the nation’s periphery or out of the country altogether.