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Lewis Henry Morgan has been credited as being the founder of American cultural anthropology or more broadly as the “Father of American Anthropology.” Unlike many anthropologists of the time, Morgan was not an “arm-chair” anthropologist. He went out into the field to learn out other cultures. As noted by Kinton, Jacob Bachofen and John McLennan influenced Morgan (1974:4).
Morgan started his work with the extensive ethnographic study of the Iroquois. Although, as Langness informs us, the driving force behind Morgan’s “devotion” to the field was due to a chance meeting with a young, educated Seneca Indian, named Ely Parker (1974:20). Morgan is best known for his work on kinship and social structure. He also fought to protect various Indian causes and to preserve Indian traditions. Lewis Henry Morgan’s work has gone past the fields of anthropology and ethnology. His works on social structure inspired the writings and ideas of Karl Marx and, through Marx, Frederick Engels (Stern 1946).
Morgan’s first major work was League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois written in 1851 many people consider it the “first scientific study of an American Indian tribe” (Meggers 1946). Morgan had studied the Iroquois culture with the help of Ely Parker. In fact, Morgan dedicated the book to Parker stating the book is “…the fruit of [their] joint researches” (1851). During his research, Morgan noticed differences between the European model of kinship and the Iroquois model of kinship. It is this “discovery” that leads to and expansion of the idea of kinship structure in later works, such as Ancient Society.
In his 1877 book Ancient Society, which was a global survey (Kinton 1974:4), Morgan breaks up humanity into three broad categories. Morgan states...

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...lier, but his stance on religion produced one of the most quoted ethnocentric statements (probably to a fallacious extent) in anthropology:
The growth of religious ideas is environed with such intrinsic difficulties that it may never receive a perfectly satisfactory exposition. Religion deals so largely with the imaginative and emotional nature, and consequently with such an certain elements of knowledge, the all primitive religions are grotesque to some extent unintelligible. (1877:5)
It is believed that Morgan thought this way about religion and did not put much effort into it because his model did not take into account “mind” and therefore religion did not fit (Langness 1974:24).
Although some of Morgan’s ideas have been discredited or revised, what he accomplished, such as his work on kinship systems, survives to this day and is still the topic of discussion.