In 1928, Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (hereafter CA) in which she argued that adolescents in 1920s Samoa experienced a transition to adulthood that was relatively stress-free in relation to Western societies. Her conclusion that the incidence and prevalence of adolescent storm and stress are affected by the social structuring of this age period was subsequently accepted in some circles, but has since been independently verified in several fields, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology (e.g., Arnett, 1999; Schlegel and Barry, 1991; Petersen, 1993; Rohner, 2000). In drawing these conclusions, Mead (e.g., 1928/1973, pp. 259–261) made a number of generalizations about Samoan culture and mores that she knew at the time were speculative. The accuracy and consistency of these speculations were of concern to a number of scholars over the years (as shown in the articles in this issue by Shankman, and Murray and Darnell), but have since become the object of great debate. The heated controversy over Mead’s research in Samoa began in the early 1980s with the publication of Freeman’s book (Freeman, 1983), Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, in which he argued that Mead was basically “wrong” about most of what she wrote about Samoan adolescence, in particular, and Samoan culture, in general. Subsequently, Freeman took his complaints about Mead’s research to the public in a documentary film (Heimans, 1988) and in a play written about his life, titled Heretic: Based on the Life of Derek Freeman (see Williamson, 1996). Simultaneously, he pressed his case against Mead to academic colleagues in a number of journal articles (e.g., Freeman, 1989, 1991a, 1991b, 1992, 1997).