ABSTRACT
A distinctive feature of American anthropology is its research interest in the *history of anthropology. This became virtually a subfield within the discipline after 1962 when the Social Science Research Council sponsored a conference on the subject. Although there had been narrative accounts of American anthropology and its leading practitioners, only Leslie White’s research in the Morgan archive provided anything like a corpus of historical inquiry. It also raised the question of historians’ and disciplinarians’ histories of anthropology.
