Melville Jean Herskovits (September 10, 1895 – February 25, 1963) was an American anthropologist who helped to first establish African and African Diaspora studies in American academia. He is known for exploring the cultural continuity from African cultures as expressed in African-American communities. He worked with his wife Frances (Shapiro) Herskovits, also an anthropologist, in the field in South America, the Caribbean and Africa. They jointly wrote several books and monographs. Early life and education Born to Jewish immigrants in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in 1895, Herskovits attended local public schools. He served in the United States Army Medical Corps in France during World War I. Afterward, he went to college, earning a Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1923. He went to New York City for graduate work, earning his M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University under the guidance of the German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas. This subject was in its early decades of being developed as a formal field of study. His dissertation, titled The Cattle Complex in East Africa, investigated theories of power and authority in Africa as expressed in the ownership and raising of cattle. He studied how some aspects of African culture and traditions were expressed in African American culture in the 1900s. Among his fellow students were future anthropologists Katherine Dunham, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Frances Shapiro. He and Shapiro married in Paris in 1924. They later had a daughter, Jean Herskovits, who became a historian. Career In 1927, Herskovits moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, as a full-time anthropologist. In 1928 and 1929 he and his wife Frances Herskovits did field work in Suriname, among the Saramaka (then called Bush Negroes) and jointly wrote a book about the people. In 1934, Herskovits and his wife Frances spent more than three months in the Haitian village of Mirebalais, the findings of which research he published in his 1937 book Life in a Haitian Valley. In its time, this work was considered one of the most accurate depictions of the Haitian practice of Vodou. They meticulously detailed the lives and Vodou practices of Mirebalais residents during their three-month stay. They conducted field work in Benin, Brazil, Haiti, Ghana, Nigeria and Trinidad. In 1938 Herskovits established the new Department of Anthropology at Northwestern. In the early 1940s, Herskovits and his wife Frances met Barbara Hadley Stein, who was