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Between the turn of the twentieth century and the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the way that American schools taught about "race" changed dramatically. This transformation was engineered by the nation's most prominent anthropologists, including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, during World War II. Inspired by scientific racism in Nazi Germany, these activist scholars decided that the best way to fight racial prejudice was to teach what they saw as the truth about race in the institution that had the power to do the most good-American schools. Anthropologists created lesson plans, lectures, courses, and pamphlets designed to revise what they called "the 'race' con...
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world."--Margaret Mead This quotation--found on posters and bumper stickers, and adopted as the motto for hundreds of organizations worldwide--speaks to the global influence and legacy of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-78). In this insightful and revealing book, Nancy Lutkehaus explains how and why Mead became the best-known anthropologist and female public intellectual in twentieth-century America. Using photographs, films, television appearances, and materials from newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, Lutkehaus explores the ways in which Mead became an American cultural heroine. Iden...
Key writings of Alice Beck Kehoe provide students and scholars of anthropology an overview of methodological and ethical issues in Americanist archaeology over the last thirty years.
Theodore E. White and the Development of Zooarchaeology in North America illuminates the researcher and his lasting contribution to a field that has largely ignored him in its history. The few brief histories of North American zooarchaeology suggest that Paul W. Parmalee, John E. Guilday, Elizabeth S. Wing, and Stanley J. Olsen laid the foundation of the field. Only occasionally is Theodore White (1905–77) included, yet his research is instrumental for understanding the development of zooarchaeology in North America. R. Lee Lyman works to fill these gaps in the historical record and revisits some of White’s analytical innovations from a modern perspective. A comparison of publications sh...
National Races explores how politics interacted with transnational science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This interaction produced powerful, racialized national identity discourses whose influence continues to resonate in today's culture and politics. Ethnologists, anthropologists, and raciologists compared modern physical types with ancient skeletal finds to unearth the deep prehistoric past and true nature of nations. These scientists understood certain physical types to be what Richard McMahon calls "national races," or the ageless biological essences of nations. Contributors to this volume address a central tension in anthropological race classification. On one hand, c...
The Meskwaki and Anthropologists illuminates how the University of Chicago?s innovative Action Anthropology program of ethnographic fieldwork affected the Meskwaki Indians of Iowa. From 1948 to 1958, the Meskwaki community near Tama, Iowa, became effectively a testing ground for a new method of practicing anthropology proposed by anthropologists and graduate students at the University of Chicago in response to pressure from the Meskwaki. Action Anthropology, as the program was called, attempted to more evenly distribute the benefits of anthropology by way of anthropologists helping the Native communities they studied. The legacy of Action Anthropology has received limited attention, but even...
In The History of Anthropology Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the Americanist tradition centered around the figure of Franz Boas and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focused on researchers often known as the Boasians, The History of Anthropology reveals the theoretical schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the anthropology and ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell's fifty-year career entails seminal writings in the history of anthropology's four fields: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physic...
"In Declared Defective: Native Americans, Eugenics, and the Myth of Nam Hollow, Robert Jarvenpa offers both an intriguing history of the mixed-race Native Americans named the "Nam," who originated from western New England, and a critical reevaluation of one of the earliest eugenics family studies, The Nam: A Study in Cacogenics, written in 1912 by the leading eugenicists Arthur H. Estabrook and Charles B. Davenport" --
In the nineteenth century the predominant focus of American anthropology centered on the native peoples of North America, and most anthropologists would argue that Korea during this period was hardly a cultural area of great anthropological interest. However, this perspective underestimates Korea as a significant object of concern for American anthropology during the period from 1882 to 1945--otherwise a turbulent, transitional period in Korea's history. An Asian Frontier focuses on the dialogue between the American anthropological tradition and Korea, from Korea's first treaty with the United States to the end of World War II, with the goal of rereading anthropology's history and theoretica...