There is a very long article about the life of Franz Boas in the March 8 New Yorker that I highly recommend. It starts out being about the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which not everybody finds as fascinating as I do, but it soon becomes much more far reaching and central to American history. Boas is something of a hate figure among cultural conservatives as the purported great grandfather of postmodernism. This article shows why in many ways he should be a hero to liberals and left intellectuals both for both his war against eugenicist racism (which he won postumously) and for doing as much as any man to invent and propagate the concept of culture that now in some form underlies almost all social thought worth thinking.
Boas is pretty much forgotten now even among social theory antiquarians like me and no biography of him has ever been written. But he turns out to have been a really pivotal figure. And although it's a long article, it's well written and it gets better as it goes on. It's a great piece of history writing.
If anyone has a difficult time getting a hold of this issue of the New Yorker from 2 weeks ago, I just made a pdf for some friends in Europe, and I'll be glad to send it to anyone else who wanted it.
Michael