William S. Willis Jr. (1921-1983), anthropologist and ethnohistorian, contributed significantly to the understanding of the dynamics of inter-cultural exchange in a multicultural context. After receiving his doctorate from Columbia University, he was hired as the first African American professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. Upon resigning in protest from SMU in 1972, he returned to teach at Columbia University until 1975. His final years were spent studying Boasian anthropology. The collection includes correspondence, lecture notes, manuscripts of Willis' writings, and working notes. Of note, are the memos concerning his leaving Southern Methodist University and his extensive research notes on Franz Boas' views on race relations in America.

Trained as an anthropologist under Frank Speck at the University of Pennsylvania, the ethnohistorian George Snyderman (1908- ) spent his career studying Seneca Indian religion, history, and culture. Snyderman edited the previously unpublished diaries of Halliday Jackson and John Phillips, Quaker missionaries to the Senecas in the late 18th and early 19th century. The Snyderman Papers includes a small volume of correspondence, along with manuscripts of works by Snyderman and colleagues, and copies of primary source materials pertaining to Seneca history. Of particular interest is his correspondence with anthropologists William N. Fenton, Merle Deardorff, and Frank Speck and with his Seneca consultant Clara Redeye and her daughter, Helen Harris, and photographs of the Allegany Senecas taken by Fenton and Speck.

Ashley Montagu (1905-1999), physical anthropologist, was a prominent figure in American intellectual life. British by birth, educated at University College London and the London School of Economics, then Columbia University in New York City, Montagu was a persistent advocate for gender and racial equality. He was a tireless activist for human understanding and child welfare in particular. Departing from academe in 1955, a victim of McCarthyite hysteria, he was a remarkably prolific writer and speaker, eventually publishing more than 50 books, over 40 of them after he left the academy. Montagu continued to lobby passionately against the primacy of race in discussions of intellect and skill, and undertook works in a wide variety of fields, from evolution to parenting. Some of his most significant works include Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942), the UNESCO Statement on Race (1951), Man and Aggression (1968) and his novel The Elephant Man (1971), which became the basis for an award winning play and movie. Ashley Montagu's contributions to the spread of scientific knowledge and human understanding make him one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century.

The Virginia D. Hymes Papers focus primarily on the Sahaptin language research of Virginia Hymes and several others between the 1970s and 1980s. They contain several extensive lexical card files of Sahaptin, original field notes, Sahaptin texts and a dictionary, notes toward an unpublished dissertation, works by others (especially Eugene Hunn, David and Kathrine French, and Bruce Rigsby on Sahaptin, and Noel Rude on Nez Perce/Niimi'ipuutímt), and smaller amounts of teaching files, conferences, correspondence, and personal and administrative files.

During the half century leading up to the Second World War, Franz Boas helped to define academic anthropology in the United States. Trained as a geographer at the University of Heidelberg, Boas worked initially on the Inuit of Baffin Island and subsequently on the cultures of the Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, becoming a leading figure in American anthropology by the first decade of the twentieth century. As Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Boas made significant theoretical contributions to ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology, helping to ingrain the four fields approach in his discipline and introducing the concept of cultural relativism into wide currency. He was, as well, a committed Socialist and an ardent opponent of both racism and fascism. This collection includes correspondence that Boas carried on with his colleagues in anthropology, as well as with those in the other social sciences and sciences. This correspondence is rich as a source for twentieth-century historians interested in "radical" social causes, since Boas was a socialist and an outspoken voice for progressive social causes.

Elsie Clews Parsons (1875-1941) was trained as a sociologist at Columbia University, but made her greatest achievements in the fields of anthropology and folklore. Parsons' early works in the field of sociology dealt primarily with gender roles, conventions of society, and the effect of society's pressures on the individual. After a trip to the American Southwest with her husband in 1910, Parsons' interests turned to anthropology. She began making field trips to Arizona and New Mexico and, under the influence of her friend Franz Boas, Parsons recorded in meticulous detail data on social organization, religious practices, and folklore of the Southwest Indians. Concurrently, Parsons conducted research in folklore, concentrating on folk tales of Afro-Americans and Caribbean peoples. She was active in a number of professional associations and was the associate editor of the Journal of American Folklore from 1918 until her death. The Parsons Papers were acquired as two separate accessions and remains organized in two distinct subcollections. Subcollection I (572 P35), acquired in 1949, contains approximately 12 linear feet of materials focused on Parsons' career in anthropology. Subcollection II, acquired in 1985, consists of 26.25 linear feet of materials divided into ten series, covering a larger scope of Parsons' life, including family and personal correspondence.

Dell Hymes' doctoral research on Kathlamet Chinook (Indiana University, 1955) grew into a lifelong interest in the relationship between ethnography and linguistics. Following academic appointments at Harvard University (1955-1960) and the University of California, Berkley (1960-1965), Hymes joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. During twenty-two years tenure at Penn he was a professor of folklore, linguistics, sociology and education. In 1975, he was promoted to Dean of the Graduate School of Education (1975-1987). A principal proponent of the emergent field of sociolinguistics, his most influential works include Reinventing Anthropology and Language in Culture and Society. The Hymes papers cover all aspects of Dell Hymes' professional life. Subcollection I is concentrated on his years at the University of Pennsylvania, his presidencies of the American Association of Anthropology and the Linguistic Society of America, and his editorship of the journal Language in Society. Subcollection II is broader, focusing much more on published and unpublished linguistic work on dozens of languages, mostly of North America. Of particular interest is his rich correspondence with colleagues and students on linguistic issues. The papers reflect Hymes' interests in the history of linguistics and anthropology, Native American languages (especially oral literatures), and his comparative ethnographies of communication.

For many years referred to as the "Franz Boas Collection of American Indian Linguistics," this collection consists of a large body of linguistic and ethnographic material gathered together by Boas and many of his colleagues and students primarily from the 1890s to the 1940s. It contains the bulk of Boas's own fieldwork material, with the main exception of most of his Inuit and earliest Northwest Coast fieldwork. It contains the majority of the work sponsored by American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages, which was directed by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, and other academic linguists from 1927-1937. The collection, however, also contains related kinds of fieldwork and derived secondary materials created outside the auspices of this Committee, both earlier and later. The first deposit of the material arrivied in 1945. Subsequently, additional related materials were donated and added, as noted in the listings. Additionally, the documentary materials produced by some of the early projects (1945 to circa 1955) of the APS Phillips Fund for Native American Research were added to this collection. The collection has grown to over 80 linear feet of material representing at least 166 languages and dialects from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The formats range from field notes and ethnographic texts to slip files, vocabularies, lexica, and grammars, and dozens of linguists and Native consultants are represented.