The Field Museum's anthropology collections began as an assemblage of artifacts to be displayed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, but they immediately transcended the “curio cabinet" tradition of early museums. Research, context, and exhibition were the driving forces behind archaeologist Frederic Putnam's impassioned persuasion of prominent citizens to establish the Columbian Museum of Chicago in 1894. In their permanent home, the original collections of 50,000 specimens became the focus of studies that revolutionized anthropology and our perception of human diversity. From the gathering of cultural material in Melanesia and the Philippines (before World War I), to the interpretation of East Asian linguistic texts (during the interwar period), to the testing of scientific models of human behavior in the American Southwest (before and after World War II), The Field Museum’s first curators broadened and deepened the scope and significance of its collections.