2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award WinnerFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardFrom an
award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the
adventurous scientists who pioneered it a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating
origin story of our multicultural world.A century ago everyone knew that people were fated by
their race sex and nationality to be more or less intelligent nurturing or warlike. But
Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong.
Racial categories he insisted were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat
packages labeled primitive or advanced. What counted as a family a good meal or even common
sense was a product of history and circumstance not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air a
masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives Charles King shows how these
intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity. Boas's students were some of
the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead the outspoken field
researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science
of all time Ruth Benedict the great love of Mead's life whose research shaped post-Second
World War Japan Ella Deloria the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native
Americans on the Great Plains and Zora Neale Hurston whose studies under Boas fed directly
into her now classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together they mapped civilizations
from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city
streets and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an
undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of
identity we know today. Rich in drama conflict friendship and love Gods of the Upper Air is
a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.
