Lewis Henry Morgan

Anthropology ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Launay
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The United States ◽  
Subsequent Generation ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Friedrich Engels ◽  
Kinship Terminology

Lewis Henry Morgan (b. 1818–d. 1881) is considered one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology. As a young lawyer in Rochester, New York, he founded a local club, The Grand Order of the Iroquois, whose members championed Iroquois rights to their land, claimed by the Ogden Company. In the process, he acquired a more systematic interest in Iroquois culture. His researches among them led to the publication of a book-length study. His later discovery that patterns of kinship terminology in other, even unrelated, Indian cultures were very similar to those of the Iroquois launched a systematic survey of kinship nomenclature that provided a template for modern studies of kinship in anthropology. While he was working on kinship terminology, he also conducted an extensive, pioneering field study of the activities of beavers. Toward the end of his life, he formulated a grand scheme of social evolution focusing on progress in the domains of technology, government, family, and property. His work attracted the favorable attention of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but it was sharply criticized by a subsequent generation of anthropologists, especially followers of Franz Boas in the United States, who were skeptical of grand evolutionary schemes. Nonetheless, his work remains an enduring influence in the discipline.

scholarly journals ‘‘The Council has been your Creation'': Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Paradigm of the American Foreign Policy Establishment?

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-94
Author(s):  
PRISCILLA ROBERTS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Policy Elite ◽  
Obituary Notice

He was born in 1893 in the New York brownstone house near Washington Square where he lived all his adult life, a member of Edith Wharton's settled, circumscribed world of ordered privilege whose affluent, well-travelled, and sophisticated men and women traced their lineage back to the Founding Fathers and their principles to the American Revolution. His father was an artist who served as Consul General to Italy, and Armstrong was brought up in a milieu which took for granted the fact that there existed a world outside the United States. He died in 1973, as the United States finally withdrew from the Vietnam War, a conflict which deeply distressed him and shattered the foreign policy elite and its controlling consensus, whose creation had been a major part of his life's work. In an obituary notice Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., described him as “a New York gentleman of a vanishing school,” who “treated every one, old or young, famous or unknown, with the same generous courtesy and concern.”

scholarly journals Protests in the United States against Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law

1976 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-50
Author(s):  
Philip S. Foner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
Memorable Event

During the summer of 1880, John Swinton, the American journalist and social reformer, made a forty-day tour of France and England. The most memorable event of the tour was the interview he had with Karl Marx during his visit to England, at the seashore resort of Ramsgate. Swinton was tremendously impressed by Marx and, in an account of the interview which he published in the New York Sun of September 6, 1880, he referred to him as “one of the most remarkable men of the day”. One passage from Swinton's article, in particular, clearly illustrates the profound impact Marx had on him.

Francisco de Miranda

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrey Iserov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Interesting Phenomenon ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Military Commander

Francisco de Miranda (March 28, 1750, Caracas, Venezuela—July 14, 1816, La Carraca, Spain) was a Spanish American revolutionary who after a career in the Spanish Army from 1783 devoted his life to the cause of Spanish American independence. The various designs of Miranda in the 1780s–1800s were founded upon the idea of a military liberation expedition to Spanish America led by him and organized with the support of a power (Great Britain, United States, France) in conflict with Spain that would then foment existing discontent and lead to a wide-scale revolt and independence. Though these plans failed, as did his attempt to organize an expedition from New York without the support of any power (1805–1807), in 1810 the revolution in Spanish America started without his participation as a consequence of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. Miranda was called to Caracas and eventually led the short-lived First Venezuelan Republic in 1812. After its defeat he spent the last years of his life in Spanish jails. Miranda’s failure influenced the South American revolutionaries who adopted the tactics of unconditional warfare against the Spanish troops from 1813. A shrewd and sophisticated expert in world affairs and political intrigues and an acclaimed military commander, Miranda was persistently trying to use the conflicts between great powers to achieve his goal though he knew that these powers’ leaders were eager to use him as a trump card against the Spanish Empire in their geopolitical games. His contacts ranged from US Founding Fathers, British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and Viscount Melville to the Prussian king Friedrich II and the Russian empress Catherine II. He was a respected peer in the high society of the European “republic of letters” in the Age of Enlightenment. In the United States his friends belonged to the Federalist Party, which represents an interesting phenomenon since Federalists are usually viewed as being generally skeptical toward foreign revolutions. In Spanish America Miranda’s ideas received no support until 1810–1812, as his failed expedition clearly shows—this is an excellent example of the interplay between “evental history” (histoire évenémentielle) and the longue durée, demonstrating how fast and unpredictable radical historical change may be. In spite of this long political solitude, Miranda entered the Spanish American symbolic pantheon as the precursor of independence.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document