Fredrick Starr 1858 - 1953Starr earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Rochester (1882) and a doctorate in geology at Lafayette College (1885). While working as a curator of geology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, he became interested in anthropology and ethnology. Frederic Ward Putnam helped him become appointed as curator of AMNH's ethological collection (1889-1891).
In this period, he became active in the Chautauqua circuit as a popular professor and, in 1888-89, as registrar. When William Rainey Harper, president of the Chautauqua Institution, was named President of the University of Chicago, he appointed Starr as an assistant professor of anthropology there.
Starr moved to the University of Chicago in 1891; he served in its faculty for the next 31 years. He was an Assistant professor (1892–1895), and he gained tenure in 1896.
One of Starr's most infamous incidents occurred while traveling in Mexico. Much like ethnologist Carl Sofus Lumholtz, Starr traveled to the Purépecha community of Cheran, Michoacan located in the Meseta Purépecha in the state of Michoacan. Unlike his predecessor, Starr successfully obtained Amerindian bones, said to have been dug up from a nearby ancient burial. He intended to take these with him to the U.S. for the collection of the University of Chicago. The inhabitants of Cheran opposed having their ancestors exhumed and were rightly suspicious of Starr's motives for visiting Cheran.
In 1905-06 Starr made a study of the pygmy races of Central Africa. In 1908 he did field work in the Philippine Islands, followed by Japan in 1909-10, and Korea in 1911.
In his Truth about the Congo Free State (1907), a collection of articles regarding the Congo Free State, Starr wrote:
Many a time... I have seen a man immediately after being flogged, laughing and playing with his companions as if naught had happened. Personally, though I have seen many cases of this form of punishment, I have never seen blood drawn, nor the fainting of the victim."
