Mary L. Jobe (Mary Lenore Jobe) Akeley (born January 29, 1878, Tappan,
Ohio— died July 19, 1966, Mystic, Connecticut), explorer, photographer,
lecturer, writer, who went on numerous expeditions to the Canadian Rockies
before marrying Carl Ethan Akeley, participating in his Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy
African Hall expedition and being named Special Advisor and Assistant of the
African Hall for the Museum of Natural History, after his death in 1926. She is
the author of many publications, including Carl Akeley’s Africa, Restless
Jungle, and Congo Eden.
The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902) was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to investigate the links between the people and the cultures of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America and the Eastern Coast of Siberia. Ostensibly the goal of the expedition was to prove the Bering Strait Migration theory which postulated that the North American continent was populated by the migration of Asian peoples across the Bering Strait. However, Franz Boas, the leader of the expedition was more concerned with documenting the cultures on both sides of the Northern Pacific that he and many other anthropologists feared were soon to be lost to colonialism and acculturation.
