The Smithsonian and the American Indian

About this book

"First published in 1981 as Savages and Scientists, this book recounts the emergence of American anthropology in the nineteenth century, largely under the direction of the Smithsonian Institution. From its founding in 1846 until the emergence of university departments after the turn of the century, the Smithsonian committed the "new science" of anthropology to recording the linguistics, archaeology, and ethnology of North American Indians. As Curtis Hinsley reveals, the early anthropologists recruited by John Wesley Powell to work for the Bureau of Ethnology saw their work as a moral enterprise, an effort to measure the status of native peoples in the face of Victorian civilization. The search for scholarly rigor and respectability in this endeavor unfolds in a combined biographical, institutional, and intellectual history"--Back cover.