African-American heritage of presidents of the United States
Calvin Coolidge's mother Victoria Moor was claimed to be of a mixed-race family in Vermont. Vaughn noted that her surname was derived from "Moor", a European term for people of North Africa. He did not note that another meaning of her surname is the landscape feature of moor or bog. People's surnames were often based on such landscape features when surnames became generally adopted in 14th century England. Moor/Moore is a common name in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Moriori
Based on the writing of Percy Smith and Elsdon Best from the late 19th century, theories grew up that the Māori had displaced a more primitive pre-Māori population of Moriori (sometimes described as a small-statured, dark-skinned race of possible Melanesian origin), in mainland New Zealand – and that the Chatham Island Moriori were the last remnant of this earlier race. These theories also had the advantage – from the view of the European settlers – of undermining the notion of the Māori as the indigenous people of New Zealand, making them just one in a progression of waves of migration and conquest by increasingly more civilised and technically able peoples. This in turn was used to justify racist stereotyping, colonisation, and conquest by cultural "superiors". However, the hypothesis of a racially distinct pre-Māori Moriori people was examined and rejected by a number of historians, anthropologists and ethnologists, among them, anthropologist H.D. Skinner in 1923, ethnologist Roger Duff in the 1940s, and historian and ethnographer Arthur Thomson in 1959, as well as Michael King in "Moriori: A People Rediscovered" in 2000 and James Belich and K.R. Howe in "".