Social History of Anthropology in the United States

Thomas C. Patterson is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside.

• Introduction 1. Nation-Building on the Edge of Empires, 1600-1877 2. Anthropology in the Age of the Robber Barons, 1860-1929 3. Anthropology and the Search for Social Order, 1929-1945 4. Decolonization, the Cold War, and McCarthyism, 1945-1973 5. Crises, Neoliberalism, and Globalization, 1973-2000 6. Anthropology in the New Gilded Age, 1990-2019

It is critically important to understand how anthropology was shaped by American nation building, and the role of anthropological efforts in that project. This is why Tom Patterson’s concise and accessible book is essential reading for graduates and advanced undergraduates in anthropology. Juris M. Milestone, Department of Anthropology, Temple University, United StatesTom Patterson has done it again! Far, far more than a narrow intellectual history of anthropology, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States is a clear and penetrating analysis of the changing social and political contexts — and conflicts — that shaped anthropology’s history and intellectual development. The depth and breadth of scholarship in this book will surely make it an authoritative text for a new generation of scholars who are invested in moving past anthropology’s liberal suppositions and in aligning the discipline more closely with anti-imperial, -capitalist, and -colonial social movements. Jeff Maskovsky, The CUNY Graduate Center, United States