Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) was an American cultural anthropologist whose work helped bring anthropology to a wide public. Trained at Barnard College and Columbia University, she conducted fieldwork in the South Pacific, including Samoa and New Guinea, focusing on adolescence, gender roles, and cultural patterns. Her best-known book, *Coming of Age in Samoa* (1928), argued that human development is shaped strongly by social environment. Mead spent much of her career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and wrote widely for both scholarly and popular audiences. She became a prominent public intellectual on culture, education, and social change.