Lewis H. Morgan

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 to 1881) was an American anthropologist and social theorist who earned his living as a railroad lawyer. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, for his theories of social evolution, and for his ethnography of the Haudenosaunee, also called the Iroquois. Interested in what holds societies together, he proposed that the earliest human domestic institution was the matrilineal clan rather than the patriarchal family. He was also interested in what drives social change, and the European social theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were influenced by reading his work on social structure and on the influence of technology on progress. Morgan was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1880. He also sat in the New York State Assembly and the New York State Senate.