Franz Boas

The household in Minden ran on the ideals of 1848: a father who kept the ceremonies without the dogma, a mother who founded the town kindergarten. Boas studied physics at Heidelberg, Bonn and Kiel, wanted a dissertation on Gauss and the law of errors, and was handed the optics of water instead. Measuring how light behaves in seawater, he found he could not reliably see the difference between two shades, and the failure interested him more than the physics. He turned to perception, then to geography, then in 1883 to Baffin Island, where he sledged 26 hours through soft snow in cold below minus 46 and wrote in his diary that the more he saw of Inuit custom, the less right he could find to look down on it.

He came to the United States in 1887 to edit at Science, built and then abandoned a department at Clark over academic freedom, mounted the anthropology exhibits at the Chicago world's fair with about a hundred assistants, and settled at Columbia, where he was made professor in 1899. From there he took apart the idea that people sort into ranked biological types. He measured 17,821 immigrants and their children and showed that head shape, then treated as the fixed signature of race, shifted within a single generation. The Mind of Primitive Man, in 1911, argued that what passed for racial capacity was history and circumstance. And he trained the people who carried the argument: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Melville Herskovits.

In 1897 Boas asked the explorer Robert Peary to bring one Inuk to New York for study. Peary delivered six, who were housed in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History, and four of them died of tuberculosis inside a year. Museum staff weighted a coffin with stones and held a burial by lantern light so that a boy named Minik would believe his father was in the ground, while the man's skeleton went into the collection. Boas has been criticized ever since for arranging the whole thing and for losing interest in the survivors once the museum had what it wanted. In the same years, short of money with a family to keep, he took bones and skulls from Native graves and sold them to museums.

His profession punished him and then rebuilt itself in his image. After he wrote to The Nation in 1919 that anthropologists spying under cover of research prostituted science, the American Anthropological Association censured him by 20 votes to 10, and the censure stood until 2005. His students meanwhile founded the departments at Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern and the New School. His immigrant measurements have been refought twice since: a 2002 reanalysis said the conclusions no longer held, and a 2003 reanalysis of the same numbers said they did, with more evidence for plasticity than he had claimed. In 1963 the historian Thomas Gossett wrote that Boas may have done more against race prejudice than anyone in history.

Franz Boas's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Central Eskimo book
  His first monograph, out of the Baffin Island year 1888
• Jesup North Pacific Expedition mission
  A five-year survey of the peoples of the North Pacific rim 1897
• The Mind of Primitive Man book
  The case against ranking human beings by biological type 1911
• Handbook of American Indian Languages book
  Published by the Bureau of American Ethnology 1911
• Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants article
  Head shape moving in one generation, from 17,821 measured people 1912
• Anthropology and Modern Life book
  The argument taken out of the university and into public print 1928

• 1881 aged ~23 Takes a physics doctorate at Kiel on the color of water The topic was assigned to him. The problem of perception is what stuck.
• 1883 aged ~25 Sails for Baffin Island to study Inuit migration His first field trip, and the end of his career as a geographer.
• 1887 aged ~29 Emigrates to the United States and marries Marie Krackowizer He took an assistant editorship at Science in January of that year.
• 1892 aged ~34 Resigns from Clark University over academic freedom He had headed the country's first anthropology department there since 1889.
• 1897 aged ~39 Six Inuit are brought from Greenland at his request Four died of tuberculosis within a year. Their remains went back in 1993.
• 1899 aged ~41 Made professor of anthropology at Columbia He stayed 40 years and taught most of the next generation of the field.
• 1906 aged ~48 Gives the commencement address at Atlanta University W. E. B. Du Bois invited him. Supporting Du Bois cost him Booker T. Washington's backing.
• 1919 aged ~61 Censured by the American Anthropological Association, 20 to 10 For a letter to The Nation naming anthropologists who spied under cover of research.
• December 21, 1942 aged 84 Dies in New York at 84

• Margaret Mead 1901–1978
  Cultural anthropologist whose studies of Pacific Island societies shaped 20th-century social science. taught
• Ruth Benedict 1887–1948
  Advanced culture-and-personality anthropology through Patterns of Culture and wartime studies of Japan. taught
• Zora Neale Hurston 1891–1960
  Novelist and folklorist whose work preserved Black Southern speech and culture and became central to the American canon. taught
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. invited by
• Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
  Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training for African Americans. lost the support of
• Robert Peary 1856–1920
  Naval officer who led the disputed 1909 expedition that claimed to have reached the North Pole. commissioned