Franz Boas Facts
Franz Boas Facts
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| Interesting Franz Boas Facts: |
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| Franz Boas was born in Westphalia to parents of Jewish descent. |
| His parents were liberal, educated and wealthy and encouraged young Franz to think for himself. |
| Boas was interested in natural history from an early age and wrote a high school research paper on the geographic distribution of plants. |
| He attended Heidelberg University for a semester and then transferred to Bonn University. |
| In 1879 he transferred to the University of Kiel and received a PhD in physics there in 1881 for his dissertation entitled "Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water" which examined the reflection, absorption and polarization of sea water. |
| His first love was geography and anthropology and he began to pursue those subjects. |
| In 1883 he went to Baffin Island to study the impact of environment on the Inuit people and he was profoundly affected by the experience. |
| His first ethnography, The Central Eskimo, was published in 1888. |
| His research led him to reject the then popular idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited. |
| In January 1887 he was offered a job as assistant editor of Science. |
| In 1888 he became a docent in anthropology at Clark University. |
| He gave lectures and wrote papers debunking the then prevalent idea that all cultures evolve through the same stages and all would eventually reach the highly evolved state of European culture. |
| His work with the Inuit and Native American peoples convinced him that local conditions and history shaped the cultural and technological development of a people. |
| In 1896 he became a lecturer in anthropology at Columbia University and his program eventually became the first PhD program in anthropology in America. |
| He contributed to each of the "four fields" of anthropology: physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology and cultural anthropology. |
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