Lewis H. Morgan

Lewis Henry Morgan was born November 21, 1818, and worked as a railroad lawyer while pursuing anthropology on the side. His ethnography of the Iroquois and his theories on kinship - particularly the idea that matrilineal clans, not patriarchal families, were humanity's first domestic structure - caught the attention of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who saw in his work a material basis for social evolution. His writing on technology and progress also drew Darwin and Freud. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1880. He also sat in the New York State Assembly in 1861 and the State Senate in 1868 and 1869. He died December 17, 1881, having laid groundwork that straddled law, politics, and the young science of how societies form and change.