Man Rises to Parnassus

Man Rises to Parnassus
Author: Henry Fairfield Osborn
Publisher: Princeton, University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 1927
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Commonweal

Commonweal
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 814
Release: 1928
Genre: Periodicals
ISBN:

American Anthropology, 1946-1970

American Anthropology, 1946-1970
Author: Robert F. Murphy
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780803282803

From the early Cold War years through the social unrest and activism of the 1960s, American anthropology expanded considerably in size and outreach, becoming spectacularly global and cross-cultural in its interests. Complex societies and communities became increasingly popular subjects of inquiry; the influence of sociological methods upon fieldwork and interpretation grew; a reimagined cultural evolution emerged; and a pervasive interest in the broader forces of culture change shaped research, writing, and theory throughout the quarter century. A dynamic range of schools of anthropological thought flowered?cultural ecology, structural-functionalism, ethnoscience, and, in the last years of the era, French structuralism. The American Anthropological Association became a forum of political debate in the 1960s, and its membership included more people of color but fewer women than previously. The twenty-two selections in this volume highlight the many telling achievements and enduring insights in American anthropology during the first few decades after World War II. An introduction to these essays by Robert F. Murphy provides a historical and critical backdrop for understanding the changes and continuity in American anthropology during this time.

Progress Unchained

Progress Unchained
Author: Peter J. Bowler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2021-03-04
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1108905250

Progress Unchained reinterprets the history of the idea of progress using parallels between evolutionary biology and changing views of human history. Early concepts of progress in both areas saw it as the ascent of a linear scale of development toward a final goal. The 'chain of being' defined a hierarchy of living things with humans at the head, while social thinkers interpreted history as a development toward a final paradise or utopia. Darwinism reconfigured biological progress as a 'tree of life' with multiple lines of advance not necessarily leading to humans, each driven by the rare innovations that generate entirely new functions. Popular writers such as H. G. Wells used a similar model to depict human progress, with competing technological innovations producing ever-more rapid changes in society. Bowler shows that as the idea of progress has become open-ended and unpredictable, a variety of alternative futures have been imagined.

Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research

Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research
Author: Geoffrey A. Clark
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 532
Release:
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780202365022

While those who study human origins now agree that the evolution of modern human form extends back much further in time than the evolution of modern human behavior, they disagree sharply as to how to interpret the substantive data. Two fundamentally incommensurate interpretations of our origins, the "Replacement" camp and the "Continuity" camp, have now emerged out of pre-existing models and theories that go back to the last quarter of the 19th century. This book contends that these positions are based on radically different biases and assumptions about what the remote human past was like. The purpose of this volume is to examine those conceptual differences, not to arrive at a consensus, but rather to explore the reasons why a consensus might never be possible.

Flight of the WASP

Flight of the WASP
Author: Michael Gross
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2023-11-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 080216188X

Fifteen families.Four hundred years. The complex saga of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite in America’s history. For decades, writers from Cleveland Amory to Joseph Alsop to the editors of Politico have proclaimed the diminishment of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who for generations were the dominant socio-cultural-political force in America. While the WASP elite has, in the last half century, indeed drifted from American centrality to the periphery, its relevance and impact remain, as Michael Gross reveals in his compelling chronicle. From Colonial America’s founding settlements through the Gilded Age to the present day, Gross traces the complex legacy of American WASPs—their profound accomplishments and egregious failures—through the lives of fifteen influential individuals and their very privileged, sometimes intermarried families. As the Bradford, Randolph, Morris, Biddle, Sanford, Peabody and Whitney clans progress, prosper and periodically stumble, defining aspects in the four-century sweep of American history emerge: our wide, oft-contentious religious diversity; the deep scars of slavery, genocide, and intolerance; the creation and sometime mis-use of astonishing economic and political power; an enduring belief in the future; an instinct to offset inequity with philanthropy; an equal capacity for irresponsible, sometimes wanton, behavior. “American society was supposed to be different,” writes Gross, “but for most of our history we have had a patriciate, an aristocracy, a hereditary oligarchic upper class, who initiated the American national experiment.” In previous acclaimed books such as 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery, Gross has explored elite culture in microcosm; expanding the canvas, Flight of the WASP chronicles it across four centuries and fifteen generations in an ambitious and consequential contribution to American history.

Henry Fairfield Osborn

Henry Fairfield Osborn
Author: Brian Regal
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351930958

The discovery in the 1920s of a huge cache of fossils in the Gobi Desert fuelled a mania for dinosaurs that continues to the present. But the original goal of the expedition was to search for the origins of man. Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935), director of the American Museum of Natural History, stood at the forefront of the debate over human evolution and the expedition aimed to prove his theory of human origins. Osborn rejected the idea of primate ancestry and constructed a non-Darwinian theory that the evolution of man was the long adventurous story of individuals and groups exerting personal will-power and inborn characteristics to achieve both biological and spiritual success. It is an idea that still echoes today. Study of Osborn’s thinking, however, has been obscured by the perception that racism influenced his theories. Brian Regal paints a different and more textured picture in this book - he shows that Osborn's views on race, like his political ideas, were motivated by his science, itself grounded in religious doctrine. His belief in the Central Asian origins of man, his role as an activist for eugenic reform and immigration controls, his support for Nordicism, his place in the 'New' versus 'Old' biology debate, his role in the Christian Fundamentalist controversy, the Scopes Monkey trial, and finally his construction of the 'Dawn Man' hypothesis - all stemmed from his desire to support his human evolution theory, and point the way to salvation. This biography charts Osborn's intellectual development, from its roots in the eclectic Christianity of his mother, through his student days with Arnold Guyot, James McCosh, and T.H. Huxley, to his mature work at the American Museum. It examines his trials and tribulations, friendships and conflicts, and the world in which he lived: all contributed to the construction of his theory. It is the dramatic story of a man holding onto ideas that for him represented the very meaning of life itself.

Bulletin

Bulletin
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1304
Release: 1931
Genre: Geology
ISBN: