1.
Frances Densmore
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Frances Theresa Densmore was an American anthropologist and ethnographer born in Red Wing, Minnesota. Densmore is known for her studies of Native American music and culture, as a child Densmore developed an appreciation of music by listening to the nearby Dakota Indians. She studied music at Oberlin College for three years and she helped preserve their culture in a time when government policy was to encourage Native Americans to adopt Western customs. Densmore began recording music officially for the Smithsonian Institutions Bureau of American Ethnology in 1907, in her fifty-plus years of studying and preserving American Indian music, she collected thousands of recordings. Many of the recordings she made on behalf of the BAE now are held in the Library of Congress, while her original recordings often were on wax cylinders, many of them have been reproduced using other media and are included in other archives. The recordings may be accessed by researchers as well as tribal delegations, Densmore frequently was published in the journal American Anthropologist, contributing consistently throughout her career. She wrote The Indians and Their Music in 1926, between 1910 and 1957, she published fourteen book-length bulletins for the Smithsonian, each describing the musical practices and repertories of a different Native-American group. These were reprinted as a series by DaCapo Press in 1972 and she also was a part of A Ventriloquy of Anthros in the American Indian Quarterly along with James Owen Dorsey and Eugene Buechel. Frances Densmore page from Minnesota Public Radio Frances Densmore Minnesota Historical Society
2.
Blackfoot Confederacy
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The Siksika, the Kainai or Kainah, and the Northern Piegan or Peigan or Piikani reside in Canada, the Southern Piegan/Piegan Blackfeet or Pikuni are located in the United States. They followed the herds as they migrated between what are now the United States and Canada, as far north as the Bow River. In the first half of the 18th century, they acquired horses and firearms from white traders and their Cree, the Blackfoot used these to expand their territory at the expense of neighboring tribes. Now riding horses, the Blackfoot and other Plains tribes could also extend the range of their buffalo hunts, periods of starvation and deprivation followed, and the Blackfoot tribe was forced to adopt ranching and farming, settling in permanent reservations. In the 1870s, they signed treaties with both the United States and Canada, ceding most of their lands in exchange for annuities of food and medical aid, as well as help in learning to farm. Nevertheless, the Blackfoot have worked to maintain their traditional language, originally the Blackfoot/Plains Confederacy consisted of three peoples based on kinship and dialect, but all speaking the common language of Blackfoot, one of the Algonquian languages family. The three were the Piikáni, the Káínaa, and the Siksikáwa and they later allied with the unrelated Tsuu Tina, who became merged into the Confederacy and, with the Atsina, or Aaninin. Each of these highly decentralized peoples were divided into many bands, the band was the basic unit of organization for hunting and defence. The largest ethnic group in the Confederacy is the Piegan, also spelled Peigan or Pikuni and their name derives from the Blackfoot term Piikáni. They are divided into the Piikani Nation in present-day Alberta, a once large and mighty division of the Piegan were the Inuksik of southwestern Montana. Today they survive only as a clan or band of the South Peigan, the modern Kainai Nation is named for the Blackfoot-language term Káínaa, meaning Many Chief people. These were historically called the Blood, from a Plains Cree name for the Kainai, Miko-Ew. The common English name for the tribe is Blood or the Blood tribe, the Siksika Nations name derives from Siksikáwa, meaning Those of like. The Siksika also call themselves Sao-kitapiiksi, meaning Plains People, the Sarcee call themselves the Tsu T’ina, meaning a great number of people. During early years of conflict, the Blackfoot called them Saahsi or Sarsi, the Sarcee are from an entirely different language family, they are part of the Athabascan or Dené language family, most of whose members are located in the Subarctic of Northern Canada. Specifically, the Sarcee are an offshoot of the Beaver people and they later joined the Confederacy and essentially merged with the Pikuni. The Gros Ventre people call themselves the Haaninin, also spelled Aaninin, the French called them Gros Ventres, misinterpreting a physical sign for waterfall, and the English called them the Fall Indians, related to waterfalls in the mountains. The Blackfoot referred to them as the Piik-siik-sii-naa or Atsina, because of years of enmity, early scholars thought the Aaninin were related to the Arapaho Nation, who inhabited the Missouri Plains and moved west to Colorado and Wyoming
3.
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
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The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas and their descendants. The term Amerindian is used in Quebec, the Guianas, Indigenous peoples of the United States are commonly known as Native Americans or American Indians, and Alaska Natives. Application of the term Indian originated with Christopher Columbus, who, in his search for Asia, eventually, the Americas came to be known as the West Indies, a name still used to refer to the islands of the Caribbean Sea. This led to the blanket term Indies and Indians for the indigenous inhabitants, although some indigenous peoples of the Americas were traditionally hunter-gatherers—and many, especially in the Amazon basin, still are—many groups practiced aquaculture and agriculture. The impact of their agricultural endowment to the world is a testament to their time, although some societies depended heavily on agriculture, others practiced a mix of farming, hunting, and gathering. In some regions the indigenous peoples created monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, chiefdoms, states, and empires. Many parts of the Americas are still populated by peoples, some countries have sizable populations, especially Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Greenland, Guatemala, Mexico. At least a different indigenous languages are spoken in the Americas. Some, such as the Quechuan languages, Aymara, Guaraní, Mayan languages, many also maintain aspects of indigenous cultural practices to varying degrees, including religion, social organization, and subsistence practices. Like most cultures, over time, cultures specific to many indigenous peoples have evolved to incorporate traditional aspects, some indigenous peoples still live in relative isolation from Western culture and a few are still counted as uncontacted peoples. The specifics of Paleo-Indian migration to and throughout the Americas, including the dates and routes traveled, are the subject of ongoing research. According to archaeological and genetic evidence, North and South America were the last continents in the world with human habitation. During the Wisconsin glaciation, 50–17,000 years ago, falling sea levels allowed people to move across the bridge of Beringia that joined Siberia to northwest North America. Alaska was a glacial refugium because it had low snowfall, allowing a small population to exist, the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of North America, blocking nomadic inhabitants and confining them to Alaska for thousands of years. Indigenous genetic studies suggest that the first inhabitants of the Americas share a single population, one that developed in isolation. The isolation of these peoples in Beringia might have lasted 10–20,000 years, around 16,500 years ago, the glaciers began melting, allowing people to move south and east into Canada and beyond. These people are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna along ice-free corridors that stretched between the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice Sheets. Another route proposed involves migration - either on foot or using primitive boats - along the Pacific Northwest coast to the south, archeological evidence of the latter would have been covered by the sea level rise of more than 120 meters since the last ice age
4.
Smithsonian Institution
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The Smithsonian Institution, established in 1846 for the increase and diffusion of knowledge, is a group of museums and research centers administered by the Government of the United States. Originally organized as the United States National Museum, that ceased to exist as an administrative entity in 1967. Additional facilities are located in Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York City, Texas, Virginia, more than 200 institutions and museums in 45 states, Puerto Rico, and Panama are Smithsonian Affiliates. The Institutions thirty million annual visitors are admitted without charge and its annual budget is around $1.2 billion with 2/3 coming from annual federal appropriations. Other funding comes from the Institutions endowment, private and corporate contributions, membership dues, and earned retail, concession, Institution publications include Smithsonian and Air & Space magazines. The British scientist James Smithson left most of his wealth to his nephew Henry James Hungerford, Congress officially accepted the legacy bequeathed to the nation, and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust on July 1,1836. The American diplomat Richard Rush was dispatched to England by President Andrew Jackson to collect the bequest, Rush returned in August 1838 with 105 sacks containing 104,960 gold sovereigns. Once the money was in hand, eight years of Congressional haggling ensued over how to interpret Smithsons rather vague mandate for the increase, unfortunately, the money was invested by the US Treasury in bonds issued by the state of Arkansas which soon defaulted. The United States Exploring Expedition by the U. S. Navy circumnavigated the globe between 1838 and 1842, in 1846, the regents developed a plan for weather observation, in 1847, money was appropriated for meteorological research. The Institution became a magnet for young scientists from 1857 to 1866, the Smithsonian played a critical role as the U. S. partner institution in early bilateral scientific exchanges with the Academy of Sciences of Cuba. The Smithsonian Institution Building began construction in 1849, designed by architect James Renwick Jr. its interiors were completed by general contract Gilbert Cameron and the building opened in 1855. The Smithsonians first expansion came with construction of the Arts and Industries Building in 1881, Congress had promised to build a new structure for the museum if the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition generated enough income. It did, and the building was designed by architects Adolf Cluss and Paul Schulze, meigs of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The National Zoological Park opened in 1889 to accommodate the Smithsonians Department of Living Animals and this structure was designed by the D. C. architectural firm of Hornblower & Marshall. More than 40 years would pass before the museum, the Museum of History. It was designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White. That same year, the Smithsonian signed an agreement to take over the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened in the Old Patent Office Building on October 7,1968. The first new building to open since the National Museum of Natural History was the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
5.
John Wesley Powell
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John Wesley Wes Powell was a U. S. soldier, geologist, explorer of the American West, professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions. He is famous for the 1869 Powell Geographic Expedition, a river trip down the Green and Colorado rivers. Powell served as director of the U. S. Geological Survey and proposed, for development of the arid West. Powell was born in Mount Morris, New York, in 1834 and his father, a poor itinerant preacher, had emigrated to the U. S. from Shrewsbury, England, in 1830. His family moved westward to Jackson, Ohio, then Walworth County, Wisconsin, before settling in rural Boone County, as a young man he undertook a series of adventures through the Mississippi River valley. In 1855, he spent four months walking across Wisconsin, during 1856, he rowed the Mississippi from St. Anthony, Minnesota, to the sea. In 1857, he rowed down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi River, in 1858 he rowed down the Illinois River, then up the Mississippi and the Des Moines River to central Iowa. At age 25, he was elected in 1859 to the Illinois Natural History Society, Powell studied at Illinois College, Illinois Institute, and Oberlin College, over a period of seven years while teaching, but was unable to attain his degree. During his studies Powell acquired a knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin, Powell had a restless nature and a deep interest in the natural sciences. This desire to learn natural sciences was against the wishes of his father. In 1860 when Powell was on a tour he decided that the Civil War was inevitable, he decided to study military science. Powells loyalties remained with the Union and the cause of abolishing slavery, on May 8,1861, he enlisted at Hennepin, Illinois, as a private in the 20th Illinois Infantry. He was described as age 27, height 5 6-1/2 tall, light complected, gray eyes, auburn hair and he was elected sergeant-major of the regiment, and when the 20th Illinois was mustered into the Federal service a month later, Powell was commissioned a second lieutenant. He enlisted in the Union Army as a cartographer, topographer, during the Civil War, he served first with the 20th Illinois Volunteers. While stationed at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, he recruited a company that became Battery F of the 2nd Illinois Light Artillery with Powell as captain. On November 28,1861, Powell took a leave to marry the former Emma Dean. At the Battle of Shiloh, he lost most of his arm when struck by a minie ball while in the process of giving the order to fire. The raw nerve endings in his arm would continue to cause him pain for the rest of his life
6.
Ethnography
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Ethnography is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study, an ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group. The word can thus be said to have a double meaning, the resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group. The typical ethnography is a study and so includes a brief history, and an analysis of the terrain, the climate. In all cases it should be reflexive, make a contribution toward the understanding of the social life of humans, have an aesthetic impact on the reader. An ethnography records all observed behavior and describes all symbol-meaning relations, the word ethnography is derived from the Greek ἔθνος, meaning a company, later a people, nation and -graphy meaning field of study. Ethnographic studies focus on large groups of people who interact over time. Ethnography is a design, where the researcher explains about shared learnt patterns of values, behaviour, beliefs. The field of anthropology originated from Europe and England designed in late 19th century and it spread its roots to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the main contributors like EB Tylor from Britain and Lewis H Morgan, franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, were a group of researchers from United States who contributed the idea of cultural relativism to the literature. He gives the point of the native and this became the origin of field work. Since Malinowski was very firm with his approach he applied it practically and he was interested in learning the language of the islanders and stayed there for a long time doing his field work. The field of ethnography became very popular in the late 19th century, again, in the latter part of the 19th century, the field of anthropology became a good support for scientific formation. Though the field was flourishing it had a lot of threat to encounter, post colonialism, the research climate shifted towards post-modernism and feminism. Therefore, the field of anthropology moved into discipline of social science, gerhard Friedrich Müller developed the concept of ethnography as a separate discipline whilst participating in the Second Kamchatka Expedition as a professor of history and geography. Whilst involved in the expedition, he differentiated Völker-Beschreibung as an area of study. This became known as ethnography, following the introduction of the Greek neologism ethnographia by Johann Friedrich Schöpperlin, there are different forms of ethnography, confessional ethnography, life history, feminist ethnography etc. Two popular forms of ethnography are realist ethnography and critical ethnography, realist ethnography, is a traditional approach used by cultural anthropologists
7.
Archaeology
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Archaeology, or archeology, is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. In North America, archaeology is considered a sub-field of anthropology, archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology as a field is distinct from the discipline of palaeontology, Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for whom there may be no written records to study. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the advent of literacy in societies across the world, Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time. The discipline involves surveying, excavation and eventually analysis of data collected to learn more about the past, in broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Archaeology developed out of antiquarianism in Europe during the 19th century, Archaeology has been used by nation-states to create particular visions of the past. Nonetheless, today, archaeologists face many problems, such as dealing with pseudoarchaeology, the looting of artifacts, a lack of public interest, the science of archaeology grew out of the older multi-disciplinary study known as antiquarianism. Antiquarians studied history with attention to ancient artifacts and manuscripts. Tentative steps towards the systematization of archaeology as a science took place during the Enlightenment era in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, in Europe, philosophical interest in the remains of Greco-Roman civilization and the rediscovery of classical culture began in the late Middle Age. Antiquarians, including John Leland and William Camden, conducted surveys of the English countryside, one of the first sites to undergo archaeological excavation was Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments in England. John Aubrey was a pioneer archaeologist who recorded numerous megalithic and other monuments in southern England. He was also ahead of his time in the analysis of his findings and he attempted to chart the chronological stylistic evolution of handwriting, medieval architecture, costume, and shield-shapes. Excavations were also carried out in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum and these excavations began in 1748 in Pompeii, while in Herculaneum they began in 1738. The discovery of entire towns, complete with utensils and even human shapes, however, prior to the development of modern techniques, excavations tended to be haphazard, the importance of concepts such as stratification and context were overlooked. The father of archaeological excavation was William Cunnington and he undertook excavations in Wiltshire from around 1798, funded by Sir Richard Colt Hoare. Cunnington made meticulous recordings of neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, one of the major achievements of 19th century archaeology was the development of stratigraphy. The idea of overlapping strata tracing back to successive periods was borrowed from the new geological and paleontological work of scholars like William Smith, James Hutton, the application of stratigraphy to archaeology first took place with the excavations of prehistorical and Bronze Age sites
8.
Linguistics
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Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning, phonetics is the study of speech and non-speech sounds, and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties. While the study of semantics typically concerns itself with truth conditions, Grammar is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given language. These rules apply to sound as well as meaning, and include componential sub-sets of rules, such as those pertaining to phonology, morphology, modern theories that deal with the principles of grammar are largely based within Noam Chomskys ideological school of generative grammar. In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the notions of langue and parole in his formulation of structural linguistics. According to him, parole is the utterance of speech, whereas langue refers to an abstract phenomenon that theoretically defines the principles. This distinction resembles the one made by Noam Chomsky between competence and performance in his theory of transformative or generative grammar. According to Chomsky, competence is an innate capacity and potential for language, while performance is the specific way in which it is used by individuals, groups. The study of parole is the domain of sociolinguistics, the sub-discipline that comprises the study of a system of linguistic facets within a certain speech community. Discourse analysis further examines the structure of texts and conversations emerging out of a speech communitys usage of language, Stylistics also involves the study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida, for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that language be studied as a linguistic medium of communication in itself. Palaeography is therefore the discipline that studies the evolution of scripts in language. Linguistics also deals with the social, cultural, historical and political factors that influence language, through which linguistic, research on language through the sub-branches of historical and evolutionary linguistics also focus on how languages change and grow, particularly over an extended period of time. Language documentation combines anthropological inquiry with linguistic inquiry, in order to describe languages, lexicography involves the documentation of words that form a vocabulary. Such a documentation of a vocabulary from a particular language is usually compiled in a dictionary. Computational linguistics is concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective, specific knowledge of language is applied by speakers during the act of translation and interpretation, as well as in language education – the teaching of a second or foreign language. Policy makers work with governments to implement new plans in education, related areas of study also includes the disciplines of semiotics, literary criticism, translation, and speech-language pathology. Before the 20th century, the philology, first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the science of language
9.
Anthropology
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Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies, linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the development of humans. The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history and its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their New Latin anthropologia derived from the forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos and lógos. It began to be used in English, possibly via French anthropologie, various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had already been formed. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use Ethnology, was formed in 1839 and its members were primarily anti-slavery activists. When slavery was abolished in France in 1848 the Société was abandoned and these anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights activists. Anthropology and many other current fields are the results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century. For them, the publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect, Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild. Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s, there was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. When he read Darwin he became a convert to Transformisme. His definition now became the study of the group, considered as a whole, in its details. Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech and he wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He discovered the speech center of the brain, today called Brocas area after him. The title was translated as The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples. The last two volumes were published posthumously, Waitz defined anthropology as the science of the nature of man. By nature he meant matter animated by the Divine breath, i. e. he was an animist and he stresses that the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation
10.
National Museum of Natural History
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The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D. C. Opened in 1910, the museum on the National Mall was one of the first Smithsonian buildings constructed exclusively to hold the national collections and research facilities. The main building has an area of 1,500,000 square feet with 325,000 square feet of exhibition and public space. The museums collections contain over 126 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, the United States National Museum was founded in 1846 as part of the Smithsonian Institution. The museum was housed in the Smithsonian Institution Building, which is better known today as the Smithsonian Castle. A formal exhibit hall opened in 1858, the growing collection led to the construction of a new building, the National Museum Building. Covering a then-enormous 2.25 acres, it was built in just 15 months at a cost of $310,000, congress authorized construction of a new building on June 28,1902. The regents began considering sites for the new building in March, the D. C. architectural firm of Hornblower & Marshall was chosen to design the structure. Testing of the soil for the foundations was set for July 1903, the Natural History Building opened its doors to the public on March 17,1910, in order to provide the Smithsonian Institution with more space for collections and research. The building was not fully completed until June 1911, the structure cost $3.5 million dollars. The Neoclassical style building was the first structure constructed on the side of the National Mall as part of the 1901 McMillan Commission plan. In addition to the Smithsonians natural history collection, it housed the American history, art. Between 1981 and 2003, the National Museum of Natural History had 11 permanent, there were six directors alone between 1990 and 2002. Turnover was high as the directors were disenchanted by low levels of funding. Robert W. Fri was named the director in 1996. One of the largest donations in Smithsonian history was made during Fris tenure, kenneth E. Behring donated $20 million in 1997 to modernize the museum. Fri resigned in 2001 after disagreeing with Smithsonian leadership over the reorganization of the scientific research programs. J. Dennis OConnor, Provost of the Smithsonian Institution was named acting director of the museum on July 25,2001, eight months later, OConner resigned to become the vice president of research and dean of the graduate school at the University of Maryland
