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(Excerpt from Africa and the Discovery of America, Vol. 2 ...)
Excerpt from Africa and the Discovery of America, Vol. 2 American Anthropologist, The, vol. XXIII. Andagoya, P. De Narrative of the Proceedings of Pedrarias Davila. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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historian philologist scholars
Leo Wiener was born on July 26, 1862 in Bialystok, Poland (then White Russia), the eldest of four children of Solomon and Frieda (Rabinowicz) Wiener. His father taught school in Bialystok; his mother was descended from a rabbinical family.
Wiener displayed an unusual aptitude for languages in his school days as well as later. He was educated at the gymnasia of Minsk and Warsaw and entered the University of Warsaw as a medical student in 1880. Not finding medicine to his taste, he studied at the Berlin Polytechnicum during 1881-82.
An impractical effort to found a socialist and vegetarian community in Central America brought him almost penniless to New Orleans in 1882. He supported himself by such odd jobs as floor sweeping, farming, and cotton baling until 1883, when he became a teacher. After a year in a country school in Odessa, Mo. , Wiener taught Greek, Latin, and mathematics in the Kansas City high school. In 1892 he became assistant professor of Germanic and Romance languages at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo. A departmental reorganization and political pressure caused him to leave Missouri in 1895. Going next to Boston, he taught languages at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1895-96 and became acquainted, through staff members of the Boston Public Library, with Prof. Francis James Child of Harvard, whom he aided in tracing Scottish ballads through the South Slavic area.
Through Child, Wiener met Prof. Archibald Cary Coolidge, to whose influence he owed his appointment in 1896 as instructor in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard, the first such academic post in America. Teaching Russian, Polish, and Old Church Slavonic, Wiener remained at Harvard, rising through successive promotions to professor (1911) and becoming professor emeritus in 1930. Wiener's salient works in the field of Slavic studies include The Complete Works of Count Leo N. Tolstoy, translated and edited in the space of two years; an Anthology of Russian Literature, comprehensive for its time and largely translated by Wiener himself; and a popular Interpretation of the Russian People (1915). Wiener's interests, however, were catholic, and his endeavors had never been restricted to Slavic studies. Wiener's physical and intellectual activity was seriously curtailed by the results of an auto accident in September 1932. He died of apoplexy at the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachussets. His body was cremated.
He was instrumental in introducing the Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld to the public, and he himself published a History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1899). He contributed many etymologies to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The breadth of Wiener's interests, reinforced in later years by his violent antagonism to the communist regime in Russia, led to a gradual abandonment of research in the Slavic field, and the latter part of his career was devoted to wide-ranging and often highly original investigations of Arabic, Germanic, African, and American Indian culture, the chief fruits of which were his Commentary to the Germanic Laws and Mediaeval Documents (1915), Contributions toward a History of Arabico-Gothic Culture, Africa and the Discovery of America, and Mayan and Mexican Origins (1926).
(Excerpt from Africa and the Discovery of America, Vol. 2 ...)
With the courage of his many convictions, he did not hesitate to impose these convictions upon those closest to him, nor to defy convention and the opinion of others in laying them before the world. Philology was for Wiener but a tool of the cultural historian, and cultural history was his chief interest. His broad knowledge, industrious research, and scholarly enthusiasm were, however, to some extent counterbalanced by too great reliance on intuitive decision and too little patience with the formalities of scholarly discipline; many of his conclusions may not, in the final analysis, be accepted by the scholarly world. Nonetheless, the great body of pertinent and provoking material assembled by Wiener, and more particularly his role as the pioneer of Slavic studies in America, lend undoubted significance to his career.
Leo Wiener was a small but solid man, as quick in his physical movements as in his many enthusiasms and as industrious a gardener and mountain climber as he was a scholar.
He married Bertha Kahn of St. Joseph, Mo. in 1893. They had four children, Norbert, Frederic, Bertha, and Constance.
