Born in Minden, Germany, on July 8, 1858, the anthropologist Franz Boas was the son of the merchant Meier Boas and his wife, Sophie Meyer. Raised in the radical and tradition of German Judaism, Franz's youth was steeped in politically liberal beliefs and a largely secular outlook that he carried with him from university through his emigration to the United States.

At the universities of Heidelberg and Bonn, Boas studied physics and geography before completing a doctorate in physical geography at Kiel in 1881. Intending on testing then-current theories of environmental determinism, he signed on to an anthropological expedition to Baffin Island in 1883-1884, expecting that he would document the close adaptative fit of Central Eskimo cultures to their extreme climate. His experiences in the arctic, however, led him to the contrary conclusion: that social traditions, not environmental, exerted a dominant influence over human societies, and from this point onward, he was led to pursue the cultural over than physical dimensions of humanity.

Although he returned to Berlin after the expedition, Boas emigrated to the United States in 1885 to assume an editorial position with the journal Science, hoping to use it as a stepping-stone to an academic appointment. In 1886, he embarked upon a second major field excursion into what would become his most famous ethnographic project, working among the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw) Indians of the Northwest Coast, after which he secured his first academic position in 1889, at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. After three years at Clark and a failed appointment at the Field Museum in Chicago in 1892 (during which he played a part in organizing the anthropological exhibits for the Columbian World's Fair), Boas moved to New York City.

The restless activity of Boas's early years slowed in New York. Hired by the American Museum of Natural History (1895-1905), which became the recipient of the amazingly rich anthropological collections he accumulated on the Northwest Coast, Boas began to teach classes at Columbia University in 1896, where three years later he was appointed Professor of Anthropology. For the next 37 years, Boas ruled the anthropological roost at Columbia, accruing unprecedented power in his discipline, wielding grants, recommendations, and appointments with remarkable dexterity, and collecting about him a remarkable group of younger scholars as students and colleagues.

Distancing himself from some of the main currents of contemporary anthropological thought in the United States, and particularly from the evolutionist assumptions that riddled the discipline, Boas championed an anthropology that viewed human cultures as shaped more by historical "tradition" than biological propensity. Claiming to resist any overarching, synthetic theories of human relations, and particularly evolutionary theories of sociocultural development, Boas laid the theoretical groundwork for what became modern cultural relativism. In the process, he helped to clarify the demarcation between the concepts of culture and race and its expression in the divergence of the four fields in anthropology -- linguistics, ethnography, physical anthropology, and archaeology.

Boas's relatively few forays into physical anthropology included a pioneering anthropometric study in 1910-1911, demonstrating that the alleged mental and physical inferiority of immigrants disappeared statistically by the second generation. Opposed to immigration quotas and disdainful of the claims to science used to justify them, Boas was a consistent, strident opponent of racial determinism in intellect or behavior. A committed, politically active Socialist, he was frequently an outspoken critic of American policy. During the First World War, he spoke out against the treatment of German Americans and "enemy aliens" -- to the point of putting himself at risk -- and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany proved an even greater crusade. Despite his age, Boas took an active role in the anti-fascist struggle in the United States and was involved with numerous committees to assist refugee scholars. He was equally ardent in his efforts to criticize racial and ethnic bigotry in the United States.

As a mentor, Boas had a reputation of being directive, at times overbearing, and at the same time of doing too little to prepare his students for the rigors of fieldwork. The extraordinary number of students coming out of Columbia under his care, however, has arguably done as much to extend the Boasian approach than Boas's own writing. Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, Alfred Kroeber, Frank Speck, Edward Sapir, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, Melville Herskovits, Leslie Spier, Paul Radin, and Ashley Montagu are all students of Boas. Many continued in the same intellectual stream, some diverged, yet all bore traces of Boas's influence. He left a mark as well on the institutions of the discipline, as one of the founders of the American Anthropological Association and of the International Journal of American Linguistics.

The Franz Boas Personal and Professional Papers contain a diverse assemblage of professional correspondence, family letters, and diaries, with a valuable series of essays and lectures by Boas on both professional and political topics (democracy, race, etc.). Of particular note are his Clark University lectures of 1898 and extensive data from his 1883-1884 expedition to Baffin Island to study cultural adaptation among the Inuit. The collection includes a diary, maps, photographs (a few here, supplemented by others in the main Boas Photograph collection), a sketchbook and sketches. It also includes valuable material on Boas's research on the Kwakiutl, including ethnographic texts, linguistic data, and extensive correspondence with George Hunt. Boas's work with the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom (1940-1942) is well documented in the collection, as are his interests in the American Council of Learned Societies and its Committee on Native American Languages, Columbia University, and U.S. v. Tatos Cartozian, an interesting Armenian naturalization case of 1924-1925.

The 4.5 linear feet of correspondence from Boas in the collection is comprised primarily of letters to his family from the 1860s until his death in 1942, along with diaries for 1886, 1888, 1889. There are, as well, related Boas family letters and documents, extensive correspondence with Ernst Boas, 1898-1937 (including reminiscences of his father), and an 1880 diary kept by Boas' wife, Marie.

Physical description

19.25 lin. feet

Provenance

Majority gift of Helene Boas Yampolsky, 1961-1962, and Cecil Yampolsky, 1964. Additions from Norman F. Boas, 1998 (accessions 1998-507ms and 1998-1094ms) and unidentified.

Preferred citation

Cite as: Franz Boas Personal and Professional Papers, American Philosophical Society.

Processing information

Inventory compiled by Selma Rabinowitz, Library Receptionist and Volunteer, November 1994. Rearranged into series with some revised titles and new accessions by Brian Carpenter and Paul Sutherland, Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, 2022.

Alternate formats available

Some diaries and notebooks have been microfilmed (film 1445).

Related material

The American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages, Franz Boas Collection of Materials for American Linguistics ( Mss 497.3.B63c ) is a large collection of primary materials on Native American languages assembled, in part, under Boas's supervision, and including a large quantity of material written by Boas himself.

Boas appears as a correspondent in numerous APS collections, and in addition to its rich collections for the history of anthropology, the library houses the papers of several of Boas's former students and proteges, including Frank Speck ( Mss. Ms. Coll. 126 ), Elsie Clews Parsons ( Mss. Ms. Coll. 29 ), John Alden Mason ( Mss. B M384 ), Paul Radin ( Mss. 497.3 R114 ), and Ashley Montagu ( Mss. Ms. Coll. 109 ).

The APS also houses a microfilm (372.3, reel 1) of original materials in the Office of Anthropology Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., relating to Boas's trips to Baffin Island (N.W.T.) and British Columbia, during which he studied and collected cultural materials, 1885-1909.

The papers of Boas's son Ernst Boas ( Mss. Ms. Coll. 10 ) are housed at the APS. A physician, Ernst Boas shared his father's liberal political outlook and activist social views.

Bibliography

• American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom
• American Council of Learned Societies. Committee on Native American Languages

• Diaries.
• Lectures
• Photographs
• Sketches.

• Arctic regions -- Discovery and exploration
• Baffin Island (N.W.T.)

• Anthropologists -- United States.

• Boas, Ernst P. (Ernst Philip), 1891-1955
• Boas, Franz, 1858-1942
• Boas, Marie Anna Ernestina Krackowizer, 1861-1929
• Cartozian, Tatos
• Cattell, James McKeen, 1860-1944
• Deloria, Ella Cara, 1889-1971
• Efron, David
• Fortune, Reo, 1903-1979
• Hunt, George
• Lowie, Robert Harry, 1883-1957
• Reichard, Gladys Amanda, 1893-1955
• Sapir, Edward, 1884-1939
• Weike, Wilhelm, 1859-1917

• Anthropology -- Research -- United States
• Anthropology -- United States.
• Eskimos -- Baffin Island (N.W.T.)
• Ethnology -- North America
• Indians of North America -- Ethnology
• Indians of North America -- Languages
• Indians of North America -- Northwest Coast
• Inuit
• Jewish scientists
• Kwakiutl Indians
• Kwakiutl language
• Kwakwaka'wakw
• Languages
• Nootka Indians
• Nuu-chah-nulth
• Refugees, Political
• Scientific expeditions -- Arctic regions.
• Scientists, Refugee
• Socialists -- United States
• Tlingit Indians