San Antonio College Library

"At the end of the 19th century, everyone knew that people were defined by their race and sex and were fated by birth and biology to be more or less intelligent, able, nurturing, or warlike. But one rogue researcher looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Franz Boas was the very image of a mad scientist: a wild-haired immigrant with a thick German accent. By the 1920s he was also the foundational thinker and public face of a new school...

"'The materials have been chosen from the work of those who participated in the Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures inaugurated by Dr. Ruth Benedict, and in a series of successor projects under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History.'"

In 1920, explorer Robert Flaherty arrived on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay to film a year in the life of an Inuit hunter. This is the story of the making of the world's first documentary, Nanook of the North--and of the Inuit people who would become the stars of it. Clips from Nanook are interspersed with dramatizations in which Adamie Inukpuk, Nanook's great-grandson, plays the famed hunter. Flaherty's life among the Inuit is also dramatized, capturing...