Lewis Henry Morgan
Personal Information
Description
Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881) was an American anthropologist and social theorist, who worked as a railroad lawyer. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois. Interested in what holds societies together, he proposed the concept that the earliest human domestic institution was the matrilineal clan, not the patriarchal family. Also interested in what leads to social change, he was a contemporary of the European social theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were influenced by reading his work on social structure and material culture, the influence of technology on progress. Morgan is the only American social theorist to be cited by such diverse scholars as Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud.
Books
Ancient Society (The John Harvard Library)
"Ancient Society defines three major stages in the cultural and social evolution of mankind. Morgan describes how savages, advancing by definite steps, attained the higher condition of barbarism. He then explores how barbarians, by similar progressive advancement, finally attained civilization. Finally he discusses why other tribes and nations have been left behind in the race of progress. Inventions and discoveries show the similarity of human wants at the same stages of advancement, thus demonstrating the psychic unity of mankind. The idea of property - now an obsession in civilized society - underwent a similar process of growth and development, as did the principles of government. By the "comparative method" of using existing and historical societies as examples of previous stages, the history of human progress could be reconstructed. These parallel lines along the pathways of human progress form the principal subjects of discussion in Ancient Society."--BOOK JACKET.
The Indian journals, 1859-62
Ethnological studies made between 1859 and 1862 of Indians in Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota, with illustrations from the paintings of Catlin, Bodmer, Lewis and McKenney, and Hall. First publication.
The American beaver and his works
Howes M802 "Probably the first study of the behavior of a single animal in the mordern sense and certainly the first American work in comparative psychology."--Gach. "..long regarded as a classic on the subject." DAB, Vol. XIII, 185.