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Our next annual meetings are planned to take place in Rome in 2023, and planning is underway for an ESHHS conference in 2024 and a joint meeting with Cheiron in Paris in 2025. Congratulations to Emily Klancher Merchant, whose book, I Building the Population Bomb i (2021), has won two awards: the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award from the Population Section of the ASA (co-winner). ESHHS ARCHIVE The ESHHS now has an archive which includes documents concerned with the genesis and development of the society since its establishment in 1982. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the Chicago sociologist William F. Ogburn's (1886–1959) views about technological unemployment, which were intimately connected to his analysis of the social impacts of technological developments and resulting social problems due to cultural lag. We trace the development of his views as seen through his well‐known 1922 book, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature, his important contributions to the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (1933), and his lesser‐known pamphlets designed for a broader audience—Living with Machines (1933), You and Machines (1934), and Machines and Tomorrow's World (1938). He used these pamphlets to educate the public about the dangers of new machines and technological unemployment. In doing so, he drew upon sociological analysis in his professional scholarly writings and his long‐standing personal interests in social betterment and social reform. Our analysis also calls into question the adequacy of existing scholarship on Ogburn that has emphasized his commitment to a statistical, dispassionate, and "objectivist" approach to social science research. We call for a revised, richer, and more complex view of Ogburn's work and legacy as one of the nation's leading social scientists during the first half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-World War II era was one of great triumph for American linguists-and yet linguistics is all but absent from the historical literature on postwar social science. This paper aims to illuminate this curious situation: to understand its provenance, evaluate its merits, and contextualize it broadly. I argue that the historiographic lacuna results from two factors: (1) the opt-out of linguists from the wider American social science community, and (2) historical-developmental and -orientational factors that stand linguistics apart from the social science mainstream. The resultant isolation of linguistics has led to a parallel isolation in the historical literature. Ultimately, this paper poses a pivotal and timely question: How is the postwar social science space construed within the existing historiographic framework, and how should it be construed in order to maximize understanding? I propose a rethink of the received historiography centered on intellectual transformations and cross-disciplinary integration. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a background of the social scientist and education scholar Benchara Branford as well as an introduction to a body of historical material that illuminates the ideas presented in his published works. A biographical profile of Branford is given, noting his education, his early career, and his professional accomplishments. An overview of the primary themes in his published works is also given. The discovery of a 1913 unpublished manuscript of Branford's work is also cited and discussed.

This paper details the responses made by social scientists as well as criminal justice practitioners during 1932 to a study focusing on the status of criminology by the Bureau of Social Hygiene. These responses ultimately led to the publication of the controversial Crime, Law and Social Science (1933), which gave much-needed direction to the development of criminology. Despite the importance of these responses to the creation of criminological thought, only one (by Edwin H. Sutherland) has previously been published. Examining the responses of all of the individual participants in the project gives a clearer picture of controversies and changes which ultimately occurred as the field of criminology gradually became institutionalized as an academic discipline. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how key social issues related to American culture, social character, and politics are addressed in the work of two of America's leading liberal sociologists, David Riesman and Daniel Bell. It maps out the trajectory of Riesman's and Bell's early contributions to a critique of mass society in post-war America, as well as Bell's later formulation of “liberalism in crisis” and his assessment of culture in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism . This analysis pays particular attention to the intellectual, biographical, and social settings that helped to shape the often conflicting ideas of each thinker, and examines the discursive shifts within liberal thinking as it attempted to explain and deal with perceived new social crises from the 1950s to the present. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional sociology in the U.S. began as a field area within economics, but gradually emerged as a separate discipline. Using new data on joint meetings and the separation of departments, I track interdisciplinary relations through three phases: sponsorship (1890–1905), collaboration (1905–1940), and disengagement (post-1940). In the early years, sociology was mostly a branch of economics departments. With the formation of the American Sociological Society, relations with economics began to be more characterized by professionally autonomous collaboration. The 1920s saw a large wave of sociology departments separating from economics. Still, joint annual meetings (including joint presidential addresses) remained the norm until 1940. Paradigmatic conflict between institutional and neoclassical economists was the major force that sustained the economics–sociology collaboration. As institutionalism faded from the scene in the late 1930s, so went interdisciplinary contact. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 1945, both the Western Allies in Germany and some German social scientists embraced empirical public opinion research. This article examines the rhetoric, practices, and collaborative professional efforts of two of the most significant institutions conducting opinion research in West Germany in the 1950s: the Allensbach Institute and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Although the political stances of these institutions differed, they were motivated to apply empirical research methods associated with Anglo‐American social research to the West German population by shared concerns about the fragility of democracy, faith in the empirical sciences as an antidote to Nazi‐era thought patterns, and the need to form a united front against doubters within West Germany. Even while declaring their desire to incorporate the latest empirical advances from the United States, however, they sought to articulate the meaning of their methods and findings in terms of the specific challenges faced by West Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis assesses the factors underlying Charles Horton Cooley's place in the sociological canon as they relate to George Herbert Mead's puzzling diatribe—echoed in secondary accounts—against Cooley's social psychology and view of the self published scarcely a year after his death. The illocutionary act of publishing his critique stands as an effort to project the image of Mead's intellectual self and enhance his standing among sociologists within and outside the orbit of the University of Chicago. It expressed Mead's ambivalence toward his precursor Cooley, whose influence he never fully acknowledged. In addition, it typifies the contending fractal distinctions of the scientifically discursive versus literary styles of Mead and Cooley, who both founded the interpretive sociological tradition. The contrasting styles and attitudes toward writing of the two figures are discussed, and their implications for the problems of scale that have stymied the symbolic interactionist tradition are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical accounts of the social sciences have too often accepted local or national institu-tions as a self-evident framework of analysis, instead of considering them as being embed-ded in transnational relations of various kinds. Evolving patterns of transnational mobility and exchange cut through the neat distinction between the local, the national, and the inter-national, and thus represent an essential component in the dynamics of the social sciences, as well as a fruitful perspective for rethinking their historical development. In this pro-grammatic outline, it is argued that a transnational history of the social sciences may be fruitfully understood on the basis of three general mechanisms, which have structured the transnational flows of people and ideas in decisive ways: (a) the functioning of international scholarly institutions, (b) the transnational mobility of scholars, and (c) the politics of trans-national exchange of nonacademic institutions. The article subsequently examines and illustrates each of these mechanisms. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an article in this journal, Nicholas Pastore rejected Ludwig Wittgenstein's critique of Wolfgang Köhler and Gestalt psychology. Pastore appears not to have appreciated Wittgenstein's argument that Köhler mistook conceptual questions for factual ones. A simi-lar confusion seems to underlie at least some aspects of contemporary neuroscience. Be that as it may, Wittgenstein has had minimal influence on the research practices of psychologists while Köhler remains influential. This outcome would not have surprised Wittgenstein, who predicted that scientists would not see his work as relevant to theirs. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces that the European Society for the History of Human Sciences is accepting abstracts of articles for its conference to be held on July 17 to 20, 2018. The deadline for submissions is on March 1, 2018 which must tackle any aspect of human, behavioural and social sciences including digital history. It also presents guidelines for submissions and the travel stipends available for students or scholars needing economic support.