Solon Toothaker Kimball (August 12, 1909 – October 12, 1982) was a noted educator and

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...

. Kimball was born and raised in Manhattan, Kansas. He graduated from

Kansas State University Kansas State University (KSU, Kansas State, or K-State) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Manhattan, Kansas, United States. It was opened as the state's land-grant college in 1863 and was the first public instit ...

in 1930, then received a master's degree and Ph.D in social anthropology from

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1933 and 1936. Kimball did groundbreaking anthropology work concerning family and community in rural Ireland (with Conrad Arensberg) and on the Navajo reservation in the American Southwest. Over the years, he was on the faculty of a number of universities, including the University of California, Columbia University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Florida. While in Alabama in the 1950s, Kimball studied social tension arising from racial segregation and found himself labelled an "academic radical." Kimball was a founding member of the Society for Applied Anthropology, president of the American Ethnological Society, and he was instrumental in the establishment in 1978 of the Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship Award Fund, which honors outstanding African-American graduates in the field of anthropology. Kimball was rewarded for his work with a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1966. The

American Anthropological Association The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, ...

now administers a Solon T. Kimball Award every other year to an anthropologist that effects change in public policy. The Kimball Award was initiated by royalties from ''Applied Anthropology in America'' (1978), a volume dedicated to Kimball, "who taught that the study of human behavior should be of service to people."

External links

American Anthropological Association awardsSolon Toothaker Kimball Papers
at the Newberry Library 1909 births 1982 deaths People from Manhattan, Kansas Kansas State University alumni Harvard University alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty Columbia University faculty University of Alabama faculty University of Florida faculty 20th-century American anthropologists {{US-anthropologist-stub