Lewis Henry Morgan

2 Pages 560 Words

Lewis Henry Morgan
1818 - 1881
In a farmhouse a few miles south of Aurora, New York, Lewis Henry Morgan was born on November 21, 1818. He attended Cayuga Academy in Aurora and then attended Union College and graduated in 1840. He then returned to Aurora where he read law and studied the Classics of Ancient Greece and Rome. Morgan joined a young men's literary and social club and renamed it Grand Order of Iroquois. He even wrote a constitution to encourage a kinder feeling towards the Indians.

He admired the Seneca and went to Congress to help them fight off the Ogden Land Company. The Seneca's adopted him into one of their clans and called him Tayadaowuhkuh or "one lying across" or "bridging the gap" (a bridge between the Indians and white man). Morgan discovered that the Indians in North America had some kinship patterns in common with each other. He was the first person to classify the kinship system of relationship The Indian Journals (1859-62).

Morgan's work was the foundation for the new world view of genetic explanation, cultural evolution or social Darwinism, Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines (1965).

He also brought to the people's attention the organization of the ancient Greeks and Romans were the same as the clan organization of the American Indian tribes. Before the 1870's the people did not understand the nature of them. They thought that they were ceremonial or religious institution or derived from mythology. They didn't recognize them as fundamental units of social organization. Morgan cast a new light in this area of human society and history in Ancient Society 1864.

Cultural evolution, as developed by Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, Edward B. Tylor, and others was based on a comparison among societies. Data from any source including archeological and ethnographic were accepted in assessing a society's evolutionary status. The cultures were compared in order to determine their relat...