Canadian-born American psychological anthropologist and historian known for his analysis of acculturation under the influence of technological change.

Wallace received his Ph.D. in 1950 from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and taught there from 1951 to 1988. His most important work, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (1978), is a psychoanthropological history of the Industrial Revolution. Wallace studied the cultural aspects of the cognitive process, especially when it involves the transfer of information during periods of technological expansion. In other books he compares religion as a movement of “social revitalization” among the American Indians and in modern times. His books include King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (1949), Culture and Personality (1961, rev. ed. 1970), Religion: An Anthropological View (1966), Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (1970), The Social Context of Innovation (1982), St. Clair: A Nineteenth-Century Coal Town's Experience with a Disaster-Prone Industry (1987), and The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (1993).