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This paper examines Franz Boas as an aspiring professional geographer during the 1880s: his Baffin Land research, his publications, his participation in geography organizations, and his struggle to attain a university appointment in geography. Frustrated by a seeming lack of opportunity for advancement in Germany, Boas explored career opportunities as a geographer in America and launched a series of unsuccessful but meaningful attempts to dominate the intellectual direction of American geography. Finally, the article reviews the circumstances surrounding Boas's appointment as an anthropologist at Clark University in 1889. Through examining Boas's own words and actions, the paper demonstrates that his professional identification with geography was lengthier and stronger than earlier accounts have suggested. It also critiques the myth of a Baffin Land “conversion” to anthropology, and delineates the circumstances of his shift from German human geography to his Americanist recasting of anthropology after 1889. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clark psychology in the post&shyHallian era has attracted little attention from scholars. The only general account, Carl Murchison's ‘Recollections of a Magic Decade at Clark’ (1959), is both partisan and limited in scope. This paper examines the ‘second cycle’ of the Clark department in a period of unusual productivity in research, publication and graduate training from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties, as well as the internal tensions and constraints that led the department to self-destruct in 1936 and lose its scholarly leadership and professional visibility until the post-World War II era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]