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Auguste Comte
He is known as the father of sociology. He wanted to improve sociology. He came up with the term positivism which is the belief that knowledge should be derived from scientific observation. He wrote his theories in a book called Positive Philosophy but he died before anyone could know about his work. -
Harriet Martineau
She grew up with a lot of problems before she reached adulthood and was forced to work to support herself. Martineau is known for translating Comte's work. Despite having problems she made contributions in the areas of research methods, political economy, and feminist theory. She made established herself as a pioneering feminist theorist. She saw a link between slavery and the oppression of women. She believed womens lack of economic power helped keep them dependent. -
Karl Marx
Marx identified several social classes in the nineteenth century industrial society. He predicted at some point all industrial societies would only contain only two social classes. -
Herbert Spencer
He was taught by his father and uncle. Spencer did not like scholarly work so he didn't go to school. Herberts career was a mixture of engineering, drafting, inventing, journalism, and writing. He compared society to the human body, saying that like a body a society is composed of parts working together to promote its well being and for survival. He introduced social darwinism. Spencer visited the U.S in 1882 and corporate leaders saw his ideas as a moral for their competitive actions. -
Booker t. Washington
Washington followed the movements made by Du Bois. He began his life in slavery, and he became an educator after the emancipation proclamation. He founded the Tuskegee Institute in 1881. He worked under the assumption that blacks should accept segregation in return for promises of economic gains. -
Emile Durkheim
He first introduced the use of statistical techniques in his groundbreaking research on suicide. He demonstrated that suicide doesn't just come from the individual but the group they are involved with. He showed that human social behavior must be explained by social factors rather than just physiological ones. -
Jane Adams
Jane attended Women's Medical College of Philadelphia but had to drop out because of illness. She focused on problems caused by the imbalance of power among social classes. She was active in the woman suffrage and peace movement. She was awarded the nobel peace prize in 1931 -
George Herbert Mead
Taught at the university of chicago. He explored how our sense of self develops. According to Mead we develop our since our sense of self as we interact with the world. -
Max Weber
Weber was affected psychologically by the conflict of his parents. Weber wrote on a wide variety of topics, including the nature of power, the religions of the world, law, economics, rural and urban sociology. He wrote a book called The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism that was published in 1904-1905. He was profoundly influential in the development of sociological theory. He believed understanding personal intentions could be accomplished through Verstehen. -
Robert Ezra Park
He was an aide to Washington at the Tuskegee Institute from 1905 to 1914. He then left and went and taught at the university of Chicago. Park used Chicago as his laboratory to study collective behavior and social interaction. -
W.E.B. Du Bois
He was the first african american to receive a doctorate from harvard university. There was a big negro problem so he decided to attack it. He published his thoughts on everything in The Philadelphia Negro. He also tried to solve the racist problems in other countries. He died in Ghana at the age of 95 -
Julian Samora
First known mexican to get a doctorate degree in sociology. His focus was on discrimination, poverty, public health, and the movement of people along the mexican american border. He founded the Mexican American Graduate Studies Program and headed the Mexican Border Studies Project.