front cover of A Franz Boas Reader
A Franz Boas Reader
The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911
Franz Boas
University of Chicago Press, 1989
"The Shaping of American Anthropology is a book which is outstanding in many respects. Stocking is probably the leading authority on Franz Boas; he understands Boas's contributions to American anthropology, as well as anthropology in general, very well. . . . He is, in a word, the foremost historian of anthropology in the world today. . . . The reader is both a collection of Boas's papers and a solid 23-page introduction to giving the background and basic assumptions of Boasian anthropology."—David Schneider, University of Chicago

"While Stocking has not attempted to present a person biography, nevertheless Boas's personal characteristics emerge not only in his scholarly essays, but perhaps more vividly in his personal correspondence. . . . Stocking is to be commended for collecting this material together in a most interesting and enjoyable reader."—Gustav Thaiss, American Anthropologist
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front cover of Race, Culture, and Evolution
Race, Culture, and Evolution
Essays in the History of Anthropology
George W. Stocking, Jr
University of Chicago Press, 1982
"We have, at long last, a real historian with real historical skills and no intra-professional ax to grind. . . . All these pieces show the virtues one finds missing in . . . nearly all of anthropological history work but [Stocking's]: extensive and critical use of archival sources, tracing of real rather than merely plausible intellectual connections, and contextualization of ideas and movements in terms of broader social and cultural currents. Stocking writes very clearly; attacks important topics—race and evolution, the influence of scientism, the interaction between anthropology and other disciplines; and is methodologically very sophisticated. Though his main theme is the development of racialism and of opposition to it, his book bears on a range of issues very much alive in anthropology. . . . I would think no apprentice anthropologist ought to be pronounced a journeyman until he or she has absorbed what Stocking has to say."—Clifford Geertz, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
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Researches Into the Physical History of Man
James Cowles Prichard
University of Chicago Press, 1973
Originally published in 1813, James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Man was perhaps the most important anthropological work in English of the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century. Attacking the heterodox speculations of "polygenist" writers, Prichard defended the biblically based argument that all mankind was one species. He advanced interesting hypotheses concerning the processes of racial differentiation, and suggested the then daring possibility that the original men were black-skinned.

In his extensive introductory essay, "From Chronology to Ethnology: Prichard and British Anthropology, 1800-1850," George W. Stocking, Jr., uses Prichard's career to illuminate this previously neglected period—the "dark age" between the Victorian evolutionists and their eighteenth-century Scottish precursors. Focusing on the heritage of Christian chronological writing as a source of nineteenth-century anthropological speculation, Professor Stocking shows how Prichard's work gradually transformed this tradition into "ethnology."

Prichard's central problem was to trace to a single source all the races of men from the earliest historical records to the dispersion of mankind after the Deluge. It was in the attempt to solve this "ethnological problem" that the "embracive" tradition of late nineteenth-century English and American anthropology had its roots. As Prichard's work illustrates, every type of evidence—linguistic, cultural, and physical—was brought forth to establish affinities between different human groups.

Expanded in subsequent editions to five volumes, Prichard's Researches was to remain the major compendium of ethnological knowledge in the English language until the second half of the nineteenth century. The present reprinting of the 1813 edition in its entirety should help to reestablish Prichard's reputation as one of the "fathers" of anthropology.
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