Franz Boas, Social Activist

Franz Boas, Social Activist PDF Author: Marshall Hyatt
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Considered the father of modern American anthropology, Franz Boas introduced the relativistic, culture-centered methods and principles of inquiry that continue to dominate the field. This study analyzes the development of his thought and his contributions to racial and ethnic theory in the context of his own ethnicity and personal experience with persecution. The author focuses primarily on Boas's attempt to fuse science with political and social activism--an effort to insure that his ideological contributions to science had practical relevance to the difficult issues facing American society. Hyatt fills in the details of Boas's background, from his early years in Germany to his emigration to the United States in the late 1880s, and discusses his pivotal role in transforming anthropology from an amateur pursuit into a rigorous academic discipline. The author examines Boas's attacks on those who used science to promulgate theories of racial inferiority based on alleged differences in mental ability. He traces the origins of Boas's own theories and the use he made of them in working for equal rights for immigrants and African Americans. This is the first biographical study to focus on the historical meaning of Boas's contributions and the motivating forces that shaped his work. Essential for courses in race and ethnicity, sociology, the history of anthropology, 20th-century American history, American intellectual history, theories of culture, and related subjects.

Franz Boas, Social Activist

Franz Boas, Social Activist PDF Author: Marshall Hyatt
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Considered the father of modern American anthropology, Franz Boas introduced the relativistic, culture-centered methods and principles of inquiry that continue to dominate the field. This study analyzes the development of his thought and his contributions to racial and ethnic theory in the context of his own ethnicity and personal experience with persecution. The author focuses primarily on Boas's attempt to fuse science with political and social activism--an effort to insure that his ideological contributions to science had practical relevance to the difficult issues facing American society. Hyatt fills in the details of Boas's background, from his early years in Germany to his emigration to the United States in the late 1880s, and discusses his pivotal role in transforming anthropology from an amateur pursuit into a rigorous academic discipline. The author examines Boas's attacks on those who used science to promulgate theories of racial inferiority based on alleged differences in mental ability. He traces the origins of Boas's own theories and the use he made of them in working for equal rights for immigrants and African Americans. This is the first biographical study to focus on the historical meaning of Boas's contributions and the motivating forces that shaped his work. Essential for courses in race and ethnicity, sociology, the history of anthropology, 20th-century American history, American intellectual history, theories of culture, and related subjects.

Franz Boas, Social Activist

Franz Boas, Social Activist PDF Author: Marshall Hyatt
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book

Book Description
Considered the father of modern American anthropology, Franz Boas introduced the relativistic, culture-centered methods and principles of inquiry that continue to dominate the field. This study analyzes the development of his thought and his contributions to racial and ethnic theory in the context of his own ethnicity and personal experience with persecution. The author focuses primarily on Boas's attempt to fuse science with political and social activism--an effort to insure that his ideological contributions to science had practical relevance to the difficult issues facing American society. Hyatt fills in the details of Boas's background, from his early years in Germany to his emigration to the United States in the late 1880s, and discusses his pivotal role in transforming anthropology from an amateur pursuit into a rigorous academic discipline. The author examines Boas's attacks on those who used science to promulgate theories of racial inferiority based on alleged differences in mental ability. He traces the origins of Boas's own theories and the use he made of them in working for equal rights for immigrants and African Americans. This is the first biographical study to focus on the historical meaning of Boas's contributions and the motivating forces that shaped his work. Essential for courses in race and ethnicity, sociology, the history of anthropology, 20th-century American history, American intellectual history, theories of culture, and related subjects.

The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1

The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1 PDF Author: Franz Boas
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803269846
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
"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"--

Rethinking Race

Rethinking Race PDF Author: Vernon J. WilliamsJr.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813149088
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
In this thought-provoking reexamination of the history of "racial science" Vernon J. Williams argues that all current theories of race and race relations can be understood as extensions of or reactions to the theories formulated during the first half of the twentieth century. Williams explores these theories in a carefully crafted analysis of Franz Boas and his influence upon his contemporaries, especially W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, George W. Ellis, and Robert E. Park. Historians have long recognized the monumental role Franz Boas played in eviscerating the racist worldview that prevailed in the American social sciences. Williams reconsiders the standard portrait of Boas and offers a new understanding of a man who never fully escaped the racist assumptions of 19th-century anthropology but nevertheless successfully argued that African Americans could assimiliate into American society and that the chief obstacle facing them was not heredity but the prejudice of white America.

Gods of the Upper Air

Gods of the Upper Air PDF Author: Charles King
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385542208
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world. A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced." What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity. Boas's students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today. Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.

Rethinking Race

Rethinking Race PDF Author: Vernon J. WilliamsJr.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813188644
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
In this thought-provoking reexamination of the history of "racial science" Vernon J. Williams argues that all current theories of race and race relations can be understood as extensions of or reactions to the theories formulated during the first half of the twentieth century. Williams explores these theories in a carefully crafted analysis of Franz Boas and his influence upon his contemporaries, especially W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, George W. Ellis, and Robert E. Park. Historians have long recognized the monumental role Franz Boas played in eviscerating the racist worldview that prevailed in the American social sciences. Williams reconsiders the standard portrait of Boas and offers a new understanding of a man who never fully escaped the racist assumptions of 19th-century anthropology but nevertheless successfully argued that African Americans could assimiliate into American society and that the chief obstacle facing them was not heredity but the prejudice of white America.

Anthropology and Modern Life

Anthropology and Modern Life PDF Author: Franz Boas
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473395976
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This early work by Franz Boas was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Anthropology and Modern Life' is a work on the study of humans and their lives in various societies. Franz Boas was born on July 9th 1958, in Minden, Westphalia. Even though Boas had a passion the natural sciences, he enrolled at the University at Kiel as an undergraduate in Physics. Boas completed his degree with a dissertation on the optical properties of water, before continuing his studies and receiving his doctorate in 1881. Boas became a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in 1899 and founded the first Ph.D program in anthropology in America. He was also a leading figure in the creation of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Franz Boas had a long career and a great impact on many areas of study. He died on 21st December 1942.

The Political Activism of Anthropologist Franz Boas, Citizen Scientist

The Political Activism of Anthropologist Franz Boas, Citizen Scientist PDF Author: Alan H. McGowan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527566897
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book chronicles the life and political action of Franz Boas, a ground-breaking anthropologist whose work denied the notion of racial superiority and introduced the notion of cultural relativity. In addition, he was a fierce pacifist who opposed the entry of the United States into World War I, and organized a powerful organization protecting the free speech of those accused of left-wing sympathies. He was among the first to recognize the strength of a scientist speaking out on political issues. The book will appeal to those interested in issues of race relations and free speech, and those interested in the role of science and scientists in the larger society.

Franz Boas

Franz Boas PDF Author: Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149623331X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 517

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Book Description
Franz Boas defined the concept of cultural relativism and reoriented the humanities and social sciences away from race science toward an antiracist and anticolonialist understanding of human biology and culture. Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice is the second volume in Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt's two-part biography of the renowned anthropologist and public intellectual. Zumwalt takes the reader through the most vital period in the development of Americanist anthropology and Boas's rise to dominance in the subfields of cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. Boas's emergence as a prominent public intellectual, particularly his opposition to U.S. entry into World War I, reveals his struggle against the forces of nativism, racial hatred, ethnic chauvinism, scientific racism, and uncritical nationalism. Boas was instrumental in the American cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, training students and influencing colleagues such as Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, Benjamin Botkin, Alan Lomax, Langston Hughes, and others involved in combating racism and the flourishing Harlem Renaissance. He assisted German and European émigré intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany to relocate in the United States and was instrumental in organizing the denunciation of Nazi racial science and American eugenics. At the end of his career Boas guided a network of former student anthropologists, who spread across the country to university departments, museums, and government agencies, imprinting his social science more broadly in the world of learned knowledge. Franz Boas is a magisterial biography of Franz Boas and his influence in shaping not only anthropology but also the sciences, humanities, social science, visual and performing arts, and America's public sphere during a period of great global upheaval and democratic and social struggle.

Social Scientists for Social Justice

Social Scientists for Social Justice PDF Author: John P. Jackson, Jr.
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814743277
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In one of the twentieth century's landmark Supreme Court cases, Brown v. Board of Education, social scientists such as Kenneth Clark helped to convince the Supreme Court Justices of the debilitating psychological effects of racism and segregation. John P. Jackson, Jr., examines the well-known studies used in support of Brown, such as Clark’s famous “doll tests,” as well as decades of research on race which lead up to the case. Jackson reveals the struggles of social scientists in their effort to impact American law and policy on race and poverty and demonstrates that without these scientists, who brought their talents to bear on the most pressing issues of the day, we wouldn’t enjoy the legal protections against discrimination we may now take for granted. For anyone interested in the history and legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, this is an essential book.