The journal was established in 1960 with funding from
segregationists, who designed it to serve as a mouthpiece for their views. The costs of initially launching the journal were paid by the
Pioneer Fund's
Wickliffe Draper.
Otmar von Verschuer and
Reginald Ruggles Gates. Another early editor was
Herbert Charles Sanborn, formerly the chair of the department of Philosophy and Psychology at
Vanderbilt University from 1921 to 1942. It was originally published in
Edinburgh,
Scotland, by the
International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, an organization founded by Draper to promote eugenics and scientific racism. In 1963, after the journal's first issue, contributors
U. R. Ehrenfels,
T. N. Madan, and Juan Comas said that the journal's editorial practice was biased and misleading. In response, the journal published a series of rebuttals and attacks on Comas. Comas argued in
Current Anthropology that the journal's publication of
A. James Gregor's review of Comas' book
Racial Myths was politically motivated. Comas claimed the journal misrepresented the field of physical anthropology by adhering to outdated racial ideologies, for example by claiming that
Jews were considered a "biological race" by the racial biologists of the time. Other anthropologists complained that paragraphs that did not agree with the racial ideology of the editorial board were deleted from published articles without the authors' agreement. Few academic anthropologists would publish in the journal or serve on its board; when Gates died,
Carleton S. Coon, an anthropologist sympathetic to the hereditarian and racialistic view of the journal, was asked to replace him, but he rejected the offer stating that "I fear that for a professional anthropologist to accept membership on your board would be the kiss of death". The journal continued to be published supported by grant money. During the "
Bell Curve wars" of the 1990s, the journal received attention when opponents of
The Bell Curve publicised the fact that some of the works cited by
Bell Curve authors
Richard Herrnstein and
Charles Murray had first been published in
Mankind Quarterly. In
The New York Review of Books, Charles Lane referred to
The Bell Curves "tainted sources", that seventeen researchers cited in the book's bibliography had contributed articles to, and ten of these seventeen had also been editors of,
Mankind Quarterly, "a notorious journal of 'racial history' founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race." The journal has been published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research since January 2015, when publication duties were transferred from
(Roger) Pearson's Council for Social and Economic Studies (which had published the journal since 1979). ==Editors==