I am grateful to Davidson College and Agnes Scott College for providing me with sabbatical leave for the research and writing of this book. For this project, I was named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and a Mellon Resident Research Fellow at the American Philosophical Society. I am grateful also to the staff of the Agnes Scott College McCain Library—especially Director of Library Services Elizabeth Bagley, User Education Librarian Casey Long, Access Services Coordinator Debbie Adams, Access Services and Interlibrary Loan Coordinator Stephany Kurth, and Administrative Coordinator Marianne Bradley. I thank Esther Muench for her German translations and Ira Jacknis for his generous help. I am enduringly grateful to the staff of the American Philosophical Society—Beth Carroll-Horrocks, who was the manuscript librarian when I began my research; Charles B. Greifenstein, associate librarian and curator of manuscripts; and the visionary and energetic Martin Levitt, librarian emeritus. I am grateful to Jocelyn K. Wilk of Columbia University Archives and to James Stimpert, senior reference archivist, Johns Hopkins University, Sheridan Libraries, Special Collections. I thank Fordyce Williams, coordinator of the Clark University Archives, for assistance on my research on Franz Boas at Clark University; and Kenn Harper for help with my research on Esther Bein and her family and on Minik and the other Inuit from Greenland. I am also indebted to Thomas Ross Miller, who has researched the history of sound recordings in the North Pacific, and Marilyn Graf, archivist for the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, for assisting me in obtaining a digitized copy of the wax cylinder recording made by Boas on June 6, 1897. I am very grateful to Kendra Meyer, digital lab manager at the American Museum of Natural History, for identifying illustrations for me. I thank my mother Dorothy V. Zumwalt, who, into her 103rd year of life, listened to me read aloud the next draft. I thank my husband, Isaac Jack Lévy, who is a constant source of encouragement to me and whom I trust always to be my first and best editor. I also recognize four Boas scholars whose works serve as a foundation for those of us who follow them: George W. Stocking Jr. (1928–2013), Douglas Cole (1938–1997), Herbert S. Lewis (1934–), and Regna Darnell (1943–).
I am grateful to those who have assisted me at the University of Nebraska Press: Matt Bokovoy, senior acquisitions editor; Heather Stauffer, associate acquisitions editor; and Ann Baker, editorial, design, and production manager. In particular, I want to thank Emily Shelton for her careful copyediting.
I dedicate my book to Ludger Müller-Wille, consummate scholar of the Arctic and of Franz Boas. A kinder, more gracious, more knowledgeable person I could not have found to assist me, as he did, at every stage in the process of writing this book.