ABSTRACT
A dominant image of nineteenth-century America was that it had been forged by westward expansion through the Alleghenies, across the Mississippi Valley, over the high plains and Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked by the creation and expansion of the federal bureaucracy, by an increase in number of colleges, by new curricula, and by the appearance of new professions. Anthropology as a profession developed in this context. The neo-Kantians maintained that there was a tension between natural and human sciences. Edgar Lee Hewett’s stature and political connections were such that any anthropologist seeking to work in the American Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, from 1910 onward had to get his approval before beginning his or her studies. Anthropology was professionalized in the waning years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Franz Boas’s article in The Nation incensed a majority of the anthropological community in the United States.
