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Sociological production is a situated and embodied activity carried out by individuals inserted in actual social relations. Considering that this feature has an influence upon the content of scholarly literature and that it can be revealed in the scientific text itself, I propound a new interpretation of the writing process of Robert E. Park's "The City," the famous paper he published initially in 1915. Customarily depicted as a manifesto for an autonomous urban sociology, I argue on the contrary that its general economy has to be linked to Park's biographical background. When he affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, Park was brought to teach a course on the social survey. "The City" was to be the academic expression of his point of view on the topic. Park's biographical encounters with some active promoters of the social survey approach are evidenced and their influence on his 1915 essay is carefully analyzed, showing notably that curious intellectual omissions in "The City" can be traced back to these previous encounters. Park's latter texts, and the 1925 revised version of "The City" in particular, are shown to provide the interwar sociologists with a peculiar narrative about the history of sociology: Park's predecessors are deliberately confined in a pre-scientific stage of the discipline and Park's original essay is presented as a seminal research program destined to be later fulfilled by the newly established urban sociologists.

The article discusses the creation of an intellectual biography of the U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons. The researcher discusses Parsons' doctoral dissertation dealing with capitalism that was analyzed by sociologist Max Weber, and how Parsons' work delivered sociology from social Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century. The author supports Parsons' work on the basis that he was a thinker and academician who did not use inconsistent analysis. The author utilized Parsons' archives at Harvard University, such as Parsons' paper "The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change."

This paper argues that foundation support of black social scientists between the world wars was a status quo oriented response to changes in the social, economic, and geopolitical status of blacks in a society presumed to be permanently biracial in law and thought Through documentation largely drawn from foundation archives and the biographies of philanthropists, foundation administrators, and social scientists, the race leader role that foundations expected black social scientists to fulfill in a rigid racial caste order is discussed Mention is also made of how the accommodative race leadership role foundations created for black social scientists restricted their range and control of research activities and influenced the careers of Charles S Johnson, E Franklin Frazier, and other black social scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

C Wright Mills directed sociologists to use sociological imaginations to understand the happenings in the world at large and to understand people through points where history and biographies intersect. Using this approach as it applies to sociology as a discipline, I examine its intersection of history and biography with regard to silencing voices that are not the status quo, i.e. white, male, and middle class, I do this using the metaphor of a magic show with three magic acts: Pulling a White Rabbit out of a Black Hat, Levitation, and The Vanishing Woman. These acts refer to the history of sociology of repressing the voices of the nonwhite, non-middle class and of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]