Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

By the time that Franz Boas arrived in New York City in 1886, the United States was in the midst of what is known as The Gilded Age. This roughly 20-year period saw a tremendous proliferation in the areas of industry, real estate development, economic growth, and westward territorial expansion. These advances convinced Americans, especially those seeking wealth and privilege, of the inherent superiority and prowess of the United States as a world power. Because the American elite consisted mainly of wealthy, white Anglo-Saxon men, the now-debunked concept of eugenics—meaning “well born”—became popularized by those seeking a scientific justification for the superiority of the white race.

Gilded Age Americans believed in manifest destiny, the idea of the United States’ unique moral superiority and divine right to increase its territory across North America. Europeans at this time were expanding their colonialist holdings in Africa and elsewhere, and technological advances in global travel made it possible for Westerners to reach more remote cultures and regions to further this project. These cultural interactions, conducted with an imperialist mindset, led Westerners to infantilize the members of the societies they studied and colonized. They acquired their artifacts and brought them to the United States, Europe, and Great Britain to display in museums or in private collections, with little understanding of the original contexts in which they were created.