"The introductory volume to the Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition, which examines Boas' stature as public intellectual in three crucial dimensions: theory, ethnography and activism"--

This inaugural volume of The Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition series presents current scholarship from the various academic disciplines that were shaped and continue to be influenced by Franz Boas (1858-1942). Few of Boas's intellectual progeny span the range of his disciplinary and public engagements. In his later career, Boas moved beyond Native American studies to become a public intellectual and advocate for social justice, particularly with reference to racism against African Americans and Jews and discrimination against women in science. He was a passionate defender of academic freedom, rigorous scholarship, and anthropology as a humane calling. The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1 examines Boas's stature as a public intellectual in three crucial dimensions: theory, ethnography, and activism. The volume's contributors move across many of the disciplines within which Boas himself worked, bringing to bear their expertise in Native studies, anthropology, history, linguistics, folklore, ethnomusicology, museum studies, comparative literature, English, film studies, philosophy, and journalism. This volume demonstrates a contemporary urgency to reassessing Boas both within the field of anthropology and beyond.

"The Shaping of American Anthropology is a book which is outstanding in many respects. Stocking is probably the leading authority on Franz Boas; he understands Boas's contributions to American anthropology, as well as anthropology in general, very well. . . . He is, in a word, the foremost historian of anthropology in the world today. . . . The reader is both a collection of Boas's papers and a solid 23-page introduction to giving the background and basic assumptions of Boasian anthropology."—David Schneider, University of Chicago "While Stocking has not attempted to present a person biography, nevertheless Boas's personal characteristics emerge not only in his scholarly essays, but perhaps more vividly in his personal correspondence. . . . Stocking is to be commended for collecting this material together in a most interesting and enjoyable reader."—Gustav Thaiss, American Anthropologist

This is the magisterial biography of Franz Boas and his influence in shaping not only anthropology but also the sciences, humanities, and social science, the visual and performing arts, and America's public sphere during a period of global upheaval and social struggle.

Two major anthropological works study the roots, structure, and classification of Indian languages.