Truman Michelson
| Truman Michelson | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 11, 1879 New Rochelle, New York |
| Died | July 26, 1938 Washington, District of Columbia |
| Citizenship |
 American
|
| Education | Harvard University, University of Leipzig, University of Bonn, |
| Occupation | Linguist, Field ethnologist |
| Employer | Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, George Washington University |
| Spouse(s) | Catharine Trowbridge Harrison |
Truman Michelson (1879–1938) was a linguist and anthropologist who worked from 1910 until his death for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. He also held a position as ethnologist at George Washington University from 1917 until 1932.
Michelson studied Indo-European historical linguistics at Harvard University, completing his doctoral degree in 1904, with further study at the Universities of Leipzig and Bonn in 1904-1905, followed by study with Franz Boas.
Soon after joining the Bureau of American Ethnology, Michelson began an extensive program of field research on North American Indian languages. Much of Michelson's research focused on languages of the Algonquian family. Bibliographies of his publications are available in Boas (1938), Cooper (1939), and Pentland and Wolfart (1982). He was the author of an early influential study classifying the Algonquian languages, although extensive further research has entirely superseded Michelson's pioneering effort.
Much of his research focussed on the Fox people and language, resulting in an extensive list of publications on Fox ethnology and linguistics. Michelson employed native speakers of the language to write Fox stories in the Fox version of the Great Lakes Algonquian syllabary, resulting in a large collection of unpublished materials. Goddard (1991, 1996) discusses the material in some of these texts. A significant text from this corpus, The Owl Sacred Pack, has recently been published. One of the texts obtained in this manner that Michelson did publish, The autobiography of a Fox Indian woman, is now available in a more complete edition, with a revised transcription of the original text and comprehensive linguistic analysis.
Michelson also assisted in the posthumous preparation and publication of a number of draft manuscripts left unpublished subsequent to the premature death of William Jones. Among these were: (a) a significant two volume collection of Ojibwe texts with translations that Jones had obtained in northwestern Ontario at Fort William Ojibwa reserve, and near Lake Nipigon, in addition to stories collected in northern Minnesota; (b) a volume of Kickapoo texts; and (c) an article on Fox for the first Handbook of American Indian languages.
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