Franz Boas

Franz Boas (born July 9, 1858, Minden, Westphalia, Germany; died December 21, 1942, New York City, United States of America) was a jewish born German-American cultural anthropologist. He is said to have established ethnology as a serious social science in the United States of America during his time at Columbia University. Among his famous anthropologists trained by Boas there were A. L. Kroeber. R. H. Lowie, Paul Radin, A. Goldenweiser, E. Sapir, M. J. Herskovits, Ruth Bendict, Margaret Mead.

Boas training in Germany at Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel was in geography and physics (Ph. D. in 1881). He first went to [Northamerica]] on an expedition to Baffin Island in 1883, to study Esquimeaux. Later fieldwork was with Native American peoples of the Northwestcoast and British Columbia, Tsimshian and Kwakiutl societies. Boas worked at the Field Museum in Chicago and at Columbia University.

Outside his profession he is famous for his agitation against racism. Although he left Germany in part because of antisemitic discrimination, Boas supported the German scientific community after the lost World War 1.