Among his many significant students were A. L. Kroeber, Alexander Goldenweiser, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gilberto Freyre.

This insight led Boas to reject the "stage"-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question.

Gauss's law of the normal distribution of errors for his dissertation, but he ultimately had to settle for a topic chosen for him by his doctoral advisor, physicist Gustav Karsten, on the optical properties of water.

[58][59] For his part, Boas self-identified as a geographer by the time he completed his doctorate,[60] prompting his sister, Toni, to write in 1883, "After long years of infidelity, my brother was re-conquered by geography, the first love of his boyhood.

[64][65] Boas did publish six articles on psychophysics during his year of military service (1882–1883), but ultimately he decided to focus on geography, primarily so he could receive sponsorship for his planned Baffin Island expedition.

The first of many ethnographic field trips, Boas culled his notes to write his first monograph titled The Central Eskimo, which was published in 1888 in the 6th Annual Report from the Bureau of American Ethnology.

[68] In the perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter, Boas reported, he and his traveling companion became lost and were forced to keep sledding for twenty-six hours through ice, soft snow, and temperatures that dropped below −46 °C.

While at the Royal Ethnological Museum Boas became interested in the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, and after defending his habilitation thesis, he left for a three-month trip to British Columbia via New York.

Although Kant considered these two interests of reason to be objective and universal, the distinction between the natural and human sciences was institutionalized in Germany, through the organization of scholarly research and teaching, following the Enlightenment.

These are the hallmarks of Boasian anthropology (which Marvin Harris would later call "historical particularism"), would guide Boas's research over the next decade, as well as his instructions to future students.

As Boas's student Robert Lowie remarked, "Contrary to some misleading statements on the subject, there have been no responsible opponents of evolution as 'scientifically proved', though there has been determined hostility to an evolutionary metaphysics that falsifies the established facts".

"[88] During Maurice Fishberg's time as a medical examiner he recorded skull and nose measurements of Jewish immigrants through which he originally asserted a genetic difference between Jews and non-Jews to describe them as another race along with Joseph Jacobs.

This combined with the growth of what Max J. Kholer called Hitlerism or later Nazism in Germany resulted in a national summit where Franz Boas who had legally and scientifically been determined to be the factually correct opinion on the genetics of the Jewish people presided as guest of honor as Maurice Fishberg along with Ellsworth Huntington discredited their prior works before The Judaens and the Jewish Academy of Sciences on March 4, 1934, to emphatically state that there is no genetic difference between Jew and non-Jew nor and superior race.

[89] In the late 19th century anthropology in the United States was dominated by the Bureau of American Ethnology, directed by John Wesley Powell, a geologist who favored Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution.

In his capacity as Assistant Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, Franz Boas requested that Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary bring one Inuk from Greenland to New York.

Boas originally wanted the AAA to be limited to professional anthropologists, but William John McGee (another geologist who had joined the BAE under Powell's leadership) argued that the organization should have an open membership.

Thus, in his 1904 article, "The History of Anthropology", Boas wrote that The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science.

One of Boas's most important books, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), integrated his theories concerning the history and development of cultures and established a program that would dominate American anthropology for the next fifteen years.

The Mind of Primitive Man ends with an appeal to humanism: I hope the discussions outlined in these pages have shown that the data of anthropology teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilization different from our own, that we should learn to look on foreign races with greater sympathy and with a conviction that, as all races have contributed in the past to cultural progress in one way or another, so they will be capable of advancing the interests of mankind if we are only willing to give them a fair opportunity.

Although other anthropologists at the time, such as Bronisław Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown focused on the study of societies, which they understood to be clearly bounded, Boas's attention to history, which reveals the extent to which traits diffuse from one place to another, led him to view cultural boundaries as multiple and overlapping, and as highly permeable.

In a programmatic essay in 1920, "The Methods of Ethnology", Boas argued that instead of "the systematic enumeration of standardized beliefs and customs of a tribe", anthropology needs to document "the way in which the individual reacts to his whole social environment, and to the difference of opinion and of mode of action that occur in primitive society and which are the causes of far-reaching changes".

In order to do this, Boas relied heavily on the collaboration of literate native ethnographers (among the Kwakiutl, most often George Hunt), and he urged his students to consider such people valuable partners, inferior in their standing in Western society, but superior in their understanding of their own culture.

Boas began by remarking that "If you did accept the view that the present weakness of the American Negro, his uncontrollable emotions, his lack of energy, are racially inherent, your work would still be noble one".

To the claim that European and Asian civilizations are, at the time, more advanced than African societies, Boas objected that against the total history of humankind, the past two thousand years is but a brief span.

I have always been of the opinion that we have no right to impose our ideals upon other nations, no matter how strange it may seem to us that they enjoy the kind of life they lead, how slow they may be in utilizing the resources of their countries, or how much opposed their ideas may be to ours ... Our intolerant attitude is most pronounced in regard to what we like to call "our free institutions."

[129] The Anthropological Society of Washington passed a resolution condemning Boas's letter for unjustly criticizing President Wilson; attacking the principles of American democracy; and endangering anthropologists abroad, who would now be suspected of being spies.

[132] Boas, and his students such as Melville J. Herskovits, opposed the racist pseudoscience developed at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics under its director Eugen Fischer: "Melville J. Herskovits (one of Franz Boas's students) pointed out that the health problems and social prejudices encountered by these children (Rhineland Bastards) and their parents explained what Germans viewed as racial inferiority was not due to racial heredity.

He also trained John R. Swanton (who studied with Boas at Columbia for two years before receiving his doctorate from Harvard in 1900), Paul Radin (1911), Ruth Benedict (1923), Gladys Reichard (1925) who had begun teaching at Barnard College in 1921 and was later promoted to the rank of professor, Ruth Bunzel (1929), Alexander Lesser (1929), Margaret Mead (1929), and Gene Weltfish (who defended her dissertation in 1929, although she did not officially graduate until 1950 when Columbia reduced the expenses required to graduate), E. Adamson Hoebel (1934), Jules Henry (1935), George Herzog (1938),and Ashley Montagu (1938).

For example, Boas originally defended the cephalic index (systematic variations in head form) as a method for describing hereditary traits, but came to reject his earlier research after further study; he similarly came to criticize his own early work in Kwakiutl (Pacific Northwest) language and mythology.

Moreover, virtually all cultural anthropologists today share Boas's commitment to field research involving extended residence, learning the local language, and developing social relationships with informants.