In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging “disappearing” Native American culture by curating objects, narrating practices, and recording languages. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee D. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. He investigates the role that ethnologists played in creating a racial politics of culture in which Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while African Americans did not. Baker argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century. As he explores the implications of anthropology’s different approaches to African Americans and Native Americans, and the field’s different but overlapping theories of race and culture, Baker delves into the careers of prominent anthropologists and ethnologists, including James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton, and Franz Boas. His analysis takes into account not only scientific societies, journals, museums, and universities, but also the development of sociology in the United States, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, and government entities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Supreme Court. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Baker tells how anthropology has both responded to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how its ideas have been appropriated (and misappropriated) to wildly different ends.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a particular story about the United States’ role in the long history of world civilization was constructed in public spaces, through public art and popular histories. This narrative posited that civilization and its benefits – science, law, writing, art and architecture – began in Egypt and Mesopotamia before passing ever further westward, towards a triumphant culmination on the American continent. Early Civilization and the American Modern explores how this teleological story answered anxieties about the United States’ unique role in the long march of progress. Eva Miller focuses on important figures who collaborated on the creation of a visual, progressive narrative in key institutions, world’s fairs and popular media: Orientalist and public intellectual James Henry Breasted, astronomer George Ellery Hale, architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and decorative artists Lee Lawrie and Hildreth Meière. At a time when new information about the ancient Middle East was emerging through archaeological excavation, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia appeared simultaneously old and new. This same period was crucial to the development of public space and civic life across the United States, as a shared sense of historical consciousness was actively pursued by politicians, philanthropists, intellectuals, architects and artists.

Examines the history of evolutionism in cultural anthropology, beginning with its roots in the 19th century, through the half-century of anti-evolutionism, to its reemergence in the 1950s, and the current perspectives on it today. No other book covers the subject so fully or over such a long period of time.. Evolutionism and Cultural Anthropology traces the interaction of evolutionary thought and anthropological theory from Herbert Spencer to the twenty-first century. It is a focused examination of how the idea of evolution has continued to provide anthropology with a master principle around which a vast body of data can be organized and synthesized. Erudite and readable, and quoting extensively from early theorists (such as Edward Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, John McLennan, Henry Maine, and James Frazer) so that the reader might judge them on the basis of their own words, Evolutionism and Cultural Anthropology is useful reading for courses in anthropological theory and the history of anthropology. 0813337666 Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology : a Critical History