Frederick Starr papers

1833-1925, early 1920s [bulk 1920-1925]

Frederick Starr was born in Auburn, New York in 1858 and died in Tokyo in 1933. He received his Ph. D. from Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, and from 1883-1889 taught biology at Coe College and geography at Chatauqua University. He worked at the American Museum of Natural History as a classifier in the Department of Ethnology. In 1891 he taught geology and anthropology at Pomona College and in the following year he organized the department of anthropology at the newly-established University of Chicago where he taught until his retirement in 1923.

The bulk of the papers deals with his work as an anthropologist among the Indian tribes of southern Mexico and includes Spanish translations of poetry and folk tales, vocabularies of Spanish words with Indian translations, anthropometrical data, and miscellaneous Mexican government documents of the 1860s. There are also lectures by Abraham Castellanos on the Mixteca language, a study by Edward Palmer of the Tarahumara tribe of Mexico, and an account book, 1833-1836, which also contains writings in the Spanish-Nahuatl (?) dialect which appear to be instructions in Roman Catholic liturgical practices. Also in the papers are letters and other material concerning Starr's work in Liberia and the Congo, reports of student demonstrations in Korea, 1929-1930, a study of the Choctaw Indians by John Casswell, a thesis by Shigeaki Ninomiya concerning the history of social classes in Japan, and a few miscellaneous items relating to China, Japan, and Korea.