William Montague Cobb (1904–1990): Obituary
✍ Scribed by Lesley M. Rankin-Hill; Michael L. Blakey
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1993
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 367 KB
- Volume
- 92
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-9483
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
William Montague Cobb's career developed during the period when physical anthropology in the United States was professionalized. As a leading activist scholar in the Afro-American community and the only Afro-American physical anthropologist Ph.D. before the Korean War, Cobb was the singular representative of Afro-American perspectives in physical anthropology for many years. W. Montague Cobb also exemplified the orientation of the physical anthropologist of the 1930s. Grounded in anatomy and medicine prior to the maturity of a separate bioanthropological curriculum, Cobb is part of a generation that linked the "founding fathers" of American physical anthropology to all of its succeeding generations. Yet he was unique not only as the sole professional Afro-American physical anthropologist in the early years of the discipline, but also as an accomplished pioneer of innovative approaches to human biology and medicine. Cobb characterized himself as "marching to the beat of a different drummer."