George Amos Dorsey

George Amos Dorsey (February 6, 1868 – March 29, 1931) was an American ethnographer of indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a special focus on the Caddoan and Siouan tribes of the Great Plains. He is credited with helping develop the anthropology of the Plains Indian tribes while serving as curator at the Field Museum in Chicago from 1898 until 1915. During this period, he also was Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago from 1907 to 1915. as assistant curator. He was promoted to curator in 1898 and served until 1915.

In the early 1900s he acquired for the museum a large number of objects from curio dealers J. F. G. Umlauff of Hamburg and W. D. Webster, and subsequently expanded the museum's ethnographic holdings with his own trip to New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, and Australia. The trip led to his sending Albert Buell Lewis on major expedition to the South Pacific.

During the Great War (World War I), Dorsey was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve. In the later part of 1918 he was appointed as assistant naval attache at Madrid, and in 1919-21 naval attache at Lisbon. He was an adviser on Spanish problems to the American Commission to Negotiation Peace at Paris.

In addition to his formal studies of early societies for anthropology, Dorsey became involved in studying the waves of emigration from "Italy, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Serbia and Bulgaria, and had studied political conditions in India, China, Japan, Australia and South Africa. He had been a delegate to international congresses of anthropology, and was a member of the Jury of Awards in this field for the St. Louis Exposition in 1904." Luetgert was convicted of the murder in his second trial.

Marriage and family Dorsey married Ida Chadsey on December 8, 1892, while completing his PhD. They had two children together: Dorothy Ann and George Chadsey Dorsey. They separated in April 1914, and were subsequently divorced. Their daughter married and their son became a manager at Marshall Field & Company in Chicago.

Legacy and honors Awarded Doctor of Laws in 1909 by Denison University

Works

(1901) (1903) (1903) Traditions of the Arikara (1904) (March 1905) (May 1905) Young Low, a novel (1917) Why We Behave Like Human Beings (1925) The Nature of Man (1927) The Evolution of Charles Darwin (1927) Race and Civilization (1928) Hows and Whys of Human Behavior (1929) On Civilization (1931, posthumously)

Many more of his works are available at the Internet Archive.