George Robbins Gliddon was an English-born American Egyptologist. He worked as a United States vice-consul in Egypt and assisted Muhammad Ali Pasha's plans to modernize Egypt by attaining sugar, rice, and other mills from the United States. In 1841, he became frustrated with Pasha's destruction of archaeological sites and wrote Appeal to the Antiquaries of Europe on the Destruction of the Monuments of Egypt.

Samuel George Morton was an American physician, natural scientist, and writer. As one of the early figures of scientific racism, he argued against monogenism, the single creation story of the Bible, instead supporting polygenism, a theory of multiple racial creations.