Franz Boas

Three new books consider the life, and impact, of Franz Boas, the "father of American cultural anthropology."

The founder of cultural anthropology, Franz Boas challenged the reigning notions of race and culture.

We often associate dance with art and performance, but it is also a way that humans document, interpret, and create history.

A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened?

On folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, who passed away sixty-five years ago today.

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today.

It’s not that there has been too much student protest. It’s that there has not been much, much more of it.

The white supremacist conspiracy theory that has inspired horrific violence in the past five years dates back to Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo.

On the robbing of Indigenous graves throughout the 19th-century.

Visiting the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

A century ago, the invocation of science was key to making Americans believe that newcomers were inferior.

How experts and their facts created immigration restriction.

A long-overdue excavation of the book that Hitler called his “bible,” and the man who wrote it.

Women anthropologists, face assault in the field, exposing victim blaming, institutional failures, and ethical gaps in academia.

In 1911, the Dillingham Commission set a half-century precedent for screening out 'undesirable' newcomers.

In 1931, Zora Neale Hurston recorded the story of Cudjo Lewis, the last living slave-ship survivor. It languished in a vault... until now.

The effort to repatriate the remains of thousands of Herero people slaughtered by German colonists at the turn of the century.

John W. W. Zeiser reviews Peter Bagge's graphic biography "Fire!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story."

Claude Lévi-Strauss and the burden of our personal archives.

A review of "Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity," by Kwame Anthony Appiah.