ABSTRACT

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) was a founding father of professional anthropology in the United States and his notebooks, letters and manuscripts provide a mine of information for the historian of the discipline. He was the first ethnographer of an Indian tribe and the first ethnologist of repute to write on *Aboriginal Australian social organization. For more than half a century, Morgan’s work lay at the heart of epistemological debates on *evolutionism, idealism, *Marxism, and *structuralism.