Natalie Cranberry’s Reviews > Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century > Status Update

Must one always kick the other fellow just because one likes one's way of life?

Boas was making a point that required readers to make a difficult conceptual leap: he was asking Americans and western Europeans to suspend their belief in their own greatness.

Boas was coming to see his profession not just as a science but also as a state of mind, even a prescription for a good life. Properly practiced, it could cultivate a disposition that pointed toward "a higher tolerance" -- one that would leave even the pitying smile behind. It was a blueprint for how anthropology might turn itself into the most hopeful of sciences, one who's job was not just to catalogue the many...

In 1907 the US Congress kicks off a special commission looking at immigration. Were countries sending their criminals and the infirm?
WHO DOES THAT SOUND LIKE?

It has been 118 years. There is no excuse for this stupid lie to still be circulating.

Some annoying, childish woman is screaming "Stop it! This is a Christian country!" at the 1893.

Things really don't change, do they? America has never been a Christian country and I hope it never becomes one. Separation of church and state, baby!

In ethnology all is individuality. It is my opinion that the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.

It is a prehistory of the seismic social changes of the last hundred years, from women's suffrage and the civil rights movement to the sexual revolution and marriage equality, as well as of the forces that push in the opposite direction, toward chauvinism and bigotry.

This book is about women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time: the struggle to prove that -- despite differences of skin color, gender, ability, or custom -- humanity is one undivided thing.
It tells the story of globalists in an era of nationalism and social division and the origins of an outlook that we now label modern and open-minded.

At stake were the consequences of an astonishing discovery: that our distant ancestors, at some point in their evolution, invented a thing we call culture.