The most celebrated anthropologist of the twentieth century, Margaret Mead (1901–1978) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 16, and died in New York City on November 15. Her career began with a shift from psychology when Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) and Franz Boas (1858–1942), two of her teachers at Columbia, attracted her with Benedict's challenge that they had "nothing to offer but an opportunity to do work that matters." Bridging these two fields, Mead became a founder of the culture and personality school of anthropology; she was deeply committed to making anthropological knowledge matter—especially in a world of rapid scientific and technological change.

Mead's career took off when she went to Samoa at age twenty-three to study adolescent girls and to explore whether the emotional strains of adolescence were uniform across cultures or varied depending on socialization and experience. This led to her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa...