Clark Wissler papers

Clark David Wissler was born on September 18, 1870 in Cambridge City, Wayne County, Indiana. Wissler graduated from Hagerstown High School in 1887 and received a B.A. and M.A. in Experimental Psychology from Indiana University in 1897 and 1899, respectively. He later received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University in 1901.

At Columbia University, Wissler became interested in the anthropological work of Franz Boas. In 1902, he joined the American Museum of Natural History in New York as assistant in ethnology under Frank Boas and also taught at Columbia University. In 1906, he was named curator of the Department of Ethnology and then curator of the Department of Anthropology in 1907 when the two departments were combined. Wissler held this position until his retirement in 1942. In 1924, Wissler became a faculty member at Yale University’s Institute of Psychology. In 1931, he became a professor in the newly-formed Department of Anthropology.

While at the American Museum of Natural History, Wissler conducted fieldwork and directed numerous projects within the fields of ethnology, physical anthropology, and archaeology, most of which concerned the cultures of North American Indian tribes such as the Dakota, Gros Ventre, and Blackfoot. Wissler published eleven monographs based on his fieldwork and oversaw the publication of thirty-eight volumes of the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. Wissler also wrote the foreword to the seminal 1929 sociological case study by Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, in which he described the Lynds' study as a “pioneer attempt to deal with a sample American community after the manner of social anthropology.”

Wissler served as the president of the American Anthropological Association from 1919-1920, chairman of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council from 1920-1921, president of the New York Academy of Sciences from 1930-1931, and president of the American Association of Museums from 1938-1945. Clark Wissler died on August 25, 1947 in New York City. He is buried in West Lawn Cemetery in Hagerstown, Indiana.

Source: National Academy of Sciences, "Clark Wissler 1870-1947: A Biographical Memoir by Stanley A. Freed and Ruth S. Freed," 1992. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/wissler-clark.pdf