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The differences between somatic psychiatrists and mental hygienists, already apparent earlier, became much more pronounced during the Depression years, partly as a consequence of their different perspectives on this social crisis. Somatic psychiatrists, emboldened by the apparent success of new medical treatment methods, reasserted the central position of the mental hospital within psychiatry, attempted to improve the discipline's position within medicine, and promoted basic research. Mental hygienists, following the ideal of prevention, proposed far-reaching programs of community mental hygiene to alleviate widespread mental distress. A small group of mental hygienists embraced socialism and advocated measures of radical social reconstruction. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clark psychology in the post&shyHallian era has attracted little attention from scholars. The only general account, Carl Murchison's ‘Recollections of a Magic Decade at Clark’ (1959), is both partisan and limited in scope. This paper examines the ‘second cycle’ of the Clark department in a period of unusual productivity in research, publication and graduate training from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties, as well as the internal tensions and constraints that led the department to self-destruct in 1936 and lose its scholarly leadership and professional visibility until the post-World War II era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on latest developments related to educational programs and activities as of October 1989. The University of Manchester Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine offers M.Sc. and Ph.D. research programs. The National Library of Medicine plans to select a recognized scholar to engage in historical research and staff consultation during the 1990-1991 season. The National Council on Public History will meet jointly with the Southwest Oral History Association in San Diego, California, March 7-10, 1990, and invites submissions for complete sessions, individual papers, panels, and media presentations.

This paper examines one aspect of early twentieth century debates over the meaning of scientific methodology and epistemology within the social sciences: the tendency of sociologists to invoke 'laboratory' as a multivalent concept and in reference to diverse institutions and sites of exploration. The aspiration to designate or create laboratories as spaces of sociological knowledge production was broadly unifying in early American sociology (1890-1930), even though there was no general agreement about what 'laboratory' meant, nor any explicit acknowledgment of that lack of consensus. The persistence of laboratory talk in sociology over decades reflects the power of 'laboratory' as a productively ambiguous, legitimizing ideal for sociologists aspiring to make their discipline rigorously scientific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1960s, Harvard psychologist David McClelland focused his research and business endeavors on increasing the need for achievement in small businesspeople, with the goal of fostering economic success in the developing world. However, by the early 1970s, McClelland would focus almost entirely on developing executives' need for power in the United States. In this paper, I argue that underlying this shift was McClelland's dedication to the project of behavioral engineering and a newfound belief that training individuals in the responsible exercise of leadership and managerial power had become the most effective path to achieving his liberal political aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Franz Boas as an aspiring professional geographer during the 1880s: his Baffin Land research, his publications, his participation in geography organizations, and his struggle to attain a university appointment in geography. Frustrated by a seeming lack of opportunity for advancement in Germany, Boas explored career opportunities as a geographer in America and launched a series of unsuccessful but meaningful attempts to dominate the intellectual direction of American geography. Finally, the article reviews the circumstances surrounding Boas's appointment as an anthropologist at Clark University in 1889. Through examining Boas's own words and actions, the paper demonstrates that his professional identification with geography was lengthier and stronger than earlier accounts have suggested. It also critiques the myth of a Baffin Land “conversion” to anthropology, and delineates the circumstances of his shift from German human geography to his Americanist recasting of anthropology after 1889. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the development and subsequent transformation of a “radical” professional model in American psychology. Its focal point is Goodwin Watson and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), an organization Watson helped found in 1936. During the Depression, he and many of his SPSSI colleagues called upon psychologists to abandon value neutrality and political disinterestedness in favor of an explicit set of social democratic goals and left-wing political alliances. Government service and political persecution during World War II led Watson to conclude that his Depression-era calls for sweeping change in psychology had neglected a number of significant political dimensions. Of particular importance was the problematic interface between psychological expertise and policy formation. In response to this concern, Watson encouraged the development of the now familiar model of the psychologist as a disinterested purveyor of value-neutral expertise. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The convergence of dance art and therapeutic culture engendered the development of dance-movement therapy in the mid to late 20th century internationally. This article traces the sociopolitical, institutional, and aesthetic influences that coalesced in this process by contrasting histories of dance-movement therapy in Hungary and in the United States. The professionalization dance-movement therapy, through which it established its own theory, practice, and training institutions, occurred first in the United States in the late 1940s. Modern dancers in the United States began to conceptualize their activity as therapeutic, and the dancer as a (secular) healer, a therapist. The influx of therapeutic concepts into the field of dance is viewed as an example of therapeutic discourse permeating various areas of life in the 20th century. The Hungarian case provides a contrasting history of therapeutic culture, one that deviates from the predominant view of the phenomenon as a product of the global spread of Western modernization and the growth of free-market capitalism. Hungarian movement and dance therapy indeed developed independently from its American predecessor. Its history is intimately tied to the sociopolitical context of state-socialist period, particularly to the institutionalization of psychotherapy in public hospitals, and to the adaptation of Western group psychotherapies within the informal setting of the "second public sphere." The legacy of Michael Balint and the British object-relations school provided its theoretical framework. Its methodology was rooted in postmodern dance. The methodological differences between American dance-movement therapy and the Hungarian method reflects the shift in dance aesthetics that occurred internationally between 1940 and 1980s., (© 2023 The Authors. Journal of The History of the Behavioral Sciences published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

In 1962, anthropologist Carleton Coon argued in The Origin of Races that some human races had evolved further than others. Among his most vocal critics were geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and anthropologist Ashley Montagu, each of whom had known Coon for decades. I use this episode, and the long relationships between scientists that preceded it, to argue that scientific research on race was intertwined not only with political projects to conserve or reform race relations, but also with the relationships scientists shared as colleagues. Demarcation between science and pseudoscience, between legitimate research and scientific racism, involved emotional as well as intellectual labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bayesian rationality is the paradigm of rational behavior in neoclassical economics. An economic agent is deemed rational when she maximizes her subjective expected utility and consistently revises her beliefs according to Bayes's rule. The paper raises the question of how, when and why this characterization of rationality came to be endorsed by mainstream economists. Though no definitive answer is provided, it is argued that the question is of great historiographic importance. The story begins with Abraham Wald's behaviorist approach to statistics and culminates with Leonard J. Savage's elaboration of subjective expected utility theory in his 1954 classic The Foundations of Statistics. The latter's acknowledged fiasco to achieve a reinterpretation of traditional inference techniques along subjectivist and behaviorist lines raises the puzzle of how a failed project in statistics could turn into such a big success in economics. Possible answers call into play the emphasis on consistency requirements in neoclassical theory and the impact of the postwar transformation of U.S. business schools. [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]

This paper has two aims. The first is to shed light on a remarkable archival source, namely survey responses from thousands of American psychologists during the 1960s in which they described their contemporary research practices and discussed whether the practices were 'ethical.' The second aim is to examine the process through which the American Psychological Association (APA) used these survey responses to create principles on how psychologists should treat human subjects. The paper focuses on debates over whether 'deception' research was acceptable. It documents how members of the committee that wrote the principles refereed what was, in fact, a disagreement between two contemporary research orientations. The paper argues that the ethics committee ultimately built the model of 'the resilient self' into the APA's 1973 ethics code. At the broadest level, the paper explores how prevailing understandings of human nature are written into seemingly universal and timeless codes of ethics. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1940s through the 1970s, articles in popular magazines and newspapers presented B. F. Skinner in a wide array of guises, from educational revolutionary and utopian to totalitarian and fascist. Understanding these diverse, and often contradictory, portrayals requires a consideration of the social and political discourses in which they were embedded. In this paper, I suggest that reports of Skinner's work were influenced by a number of cultural categories, from the better living campaign of the 1950s, to the counterculture crusade of the late 1960s. Through this examination, a multifaceted rendering of Skinner's public image that takes into account the nature of his work, the context in which it was produced, and the culture in which it was received is revealed. I propose that the received view of Skinner as maligned behaviorist actually obscures the complexity of his relationship with psychology's public throughout this period. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between the development of industrial capitalism and the development of modern social science in the United States through the writings of two of the best–known writers on social science in the late nineteenth century: Henry George, the apostle of the rights of labor and author of the classic critique of private ownership of land, Progress and Poverty; and William Graham Sumner, the arch defender of the rights of capital and author of a pioneering treatise on Folkways. The paper traces and analyzes their mutual movement away from classical political economy and toward a new social psychology in response to rising economic inequality. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the institutional character of pre-1920 psychology at Clark University with founding President G. Stanley Hall's active ‘patronage’ of ‘outsiders,’ argues that the origins of this institutional character can be found in Hall's own personal character and temperament, and traces the influence of this institutional character through much of the psychology done at Clark before 1920. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations theory took shape in the 1950s in reaction to the behavioral social science movement, emphasizing the limits of rationality in a context of high uncertainty, weak rules, and the possibility of lethal conflict. Yet the same discipline rapidly developed “rational choice” models applied to foreign policy decision making or nuclear strategy. This paper argues that this transformation took place almost seamlessly around the concept of “decision.” Initially associated with an antirationalist or “decisionist” approach to politics, the sovereign decision became the epitome of political rationality when it was redescribed as “rational choice,” thus easing the cultural acceptance of political realism in the postwar years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has frequently emphasized modern states' use of social science to impose universalized conceptions of rationality and order upon diverse, highly localized settings. The New Deal era experiences of William M. Leiserson and David J. Saposs, however, provide an analytical alternative. As students of the pioneering labor economist John R. Commons, Leiserson and Saposs sought to create mechanisms for state oversight of industrial labor relations that recognized local practices and arrangements. Although their approach failed to take hold within the National Labor Relations Board, localized institutional and political contingencies, and not a hegemonic modernism, account best for their frustrated aspirations in the late 1930s. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the attempt of social scientists associated with Unesco to create a system of knowledge production to provide the international perspective necessary for democratic governance of a world community. Social scientists constructed a federal system of international associations that institutionalized American disciplines on an international scale. An international perspective emerged through the process of interdisciplinary international research. I call this ideal of coordinating multiple subjectivities to produce objectivity the “view from everywhere.” Influenced by social psychological “action-research,” collaborative research was group therapy. The attempt to operationalize internationalists' rallying slogan, “unity in diversity,” illuminated tensions inherent in the mobilization of science for social and political reform. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the well-documented intensive battle between Alfred Kinsey and American psychiatrists around the mid-twentieth century, this paper argues that Kinsey's work, in fact, played a significant role in transforming mental health experts' view of homosexuality starting as far back as the late 1940s and extending all the way through the mid-1960s. After analyzing the way in which Kinsey's work pushed American psychiatrists to re-evaluate their understanding of homosexuality indirectly through the effort of clinical psychologists, I then focus to a greater extent on examples that illustrate how the Kinsey reports directly influenced members of the psychiatric community. In the conclusion, using a Foucauldian conception of “discourse,” I propose that in order to approach the struggle around the pathological status of homosexuality in the 1950s and the 1960s, thinking in terms of a “politics of knowledge” is more promising than simply in terms of a “politics of diagnosis.” Central to the struggle was not merely the matter of medical diagnosis, but larger issues regarding the production of knowledge at an intersection of science and medicine where the parameters of psychopathology were disputed in the context of mid-twentieth-century United States. © 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]

In the 1930s, some psychologists began to study and discuss the normal and pathological mental abilities of old age. This paper explores this research and its implications for an emerging definition of old age in the 1930s and 1940s. The argument is that these psychologists explained old age in terms of tests they had performed on children and young adults. In addition, these professionals projected their culturally bound assumptions onto their study of old age. In the process, psychologists helped to define old age as a problem that required a professional solution. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edward A. Ross, a key figure in the early history of American sociology, developed a conceptualization of natural and social changes of the material environment that is virtually forgotten today. In this paper, these topics are discussed and located vis-à-vis Ross's intellectual contemporaries and their general take on the nature/society relationship. It is argued that ecological and sociological ideas in the early twentieth century influenced one another and, in the case of Ross, produced a perspective of social change that tried to include the dynamics of nature. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the transplantation of psychoanalysis from Europe to Los Angeles and the similarities and differences in followers, cultural attitudes, institutional organization, and patient symptoms. Psychoanalysis in both places attracted psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, artists, writers, and movie people, all committed to “modernism” and cultural change. But special American conditions created greater institutional rigidity, medicalization, and a more diffuse patient symptomatology centered on the maternal relationship. Such conditions also fostered bitter disputes over modifications of psychoanalytic theory and practice which have only recently become less acute as the status of psychoanalysis has declined in America. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, 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., (© 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

The paper examines the relationship between two seminal figures in American sociology, in terms of its contribution to the movement to establish the science within the academic world. Using archival data, the analysis shows how Edward A. Ross and Pitirim A. Sorokin became acquainted and subsequently collaborated to expand the intellectual horizons and institutional base of sociology. Their collaboration is understood as intergenerational solidarity, which the paper argues is fundamental to an understanding of both the past and the future of organized sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explicates the argument of The Origins of American Science. Starting from my own historical premises and the origin of the social sciences in both historicism and science, I compare the divergent historical orientations of the sociologies of Robert Par and Max Weber. I argue that the inclination of American social science toward scientism and liberalism derives from the national ideology of American exceptionalism. Since this structural feature of American political culture was itself a part of history. I indicate how changes in historical consciousness and politics led American social scientists to reformulate exceptionalism and their disciplines. By the 1920s, their hope of establishing scientific control over, and maintaining the liberal direction of, the fast-changing national history was embodied in scientism. I close with some thoughts about the continuing power of scientism and exceptionalism since the 1920s, and the possibility that an historical. Weberian model of social science could bridge the widening gap between scientistic and hermeneutic wings of the social science disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social control doctrines of mental disorders have influenced a generation of psychologists and have shaped attitudes and discussions about how to treat mentally ill. In light of the failure of deinstitutionalization as a public policy and the contemporary concern with the medical or biological bases of psychiatric disorders, this paper re-examines social control doctrines. Reviewing mid-nineteen century statistical accounts, the author challeges claims of social control theorists and shows that in recent years some former social control advocates and revisionists have “ recanted ” and critized their earlier use of the concept of social control, particulary the characterization of the asylum as a “ total institution ”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study of an inter-university controversy over the publication of research from an interdisciplinary social science project on the forced migration and long- term internment of West Coast Japanese-Americans during World War II shows some of the difficulties of maintaining ownership of research materials. In this particular instance the junior employee was able to override his seniors' demand for control of the dissemination of research results by playing on the concerns about even appearing to suppress work for political reasons. The paper discusses conflicting norms of science and rhetorics of justification ranging from proprietary self-interest through "good science" to "the national interest" and onto "the needs of a free society." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on developments involving several research institutions and associations in the U.S. as of April 1990. Plan of Scientific Instrument Commission of the International Union of to hold its first American meeting on September 21-25, 1990; Venue of the sixteenth Colloquium on Nineteenth-Century French Studies; Establishment of the"Prizer Award"; Invitations for nominations for the 1990 Sarton Medalist and the 1991 Sarton Lecturer by the Executive Committee of History of Science Society.

A first cooperative research program in the developmental psychology was established in the Clark questionnaire studies. The program was not meant to be free­standing but to elaborate an evolutionary conception of child development synthesized from findings of several scientific fields. The short­lived program had some serious faults, but an examination of its research papers suggests that it produced some worthwhile work. The child­study researchers gathered information about children's social and emotional reactions in everyday settings; one or two of their studies were replicated; they found pattern and order; they elaborated a meaningful social­biological view of child development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 1951 president Harry S. Truman established the Psychological Strategy Board to enhance and streamline America's sprawling psychological warfare campaign against the USSR. As soon as the Board's staff began work on improving US psychological operations, they wondered how social science might help them achieve their task. Board Director, Gordon Gray, asked physicist turned research administrator Henry Loomis to do a full review of America's social science research program in support of psychological operations. Loomis willingly accepted the task. This paper documents Loomis's investigation into America's social science research program. It uncovers the critical role that government departments had in the creation of research in the early 1950s and thus highlights that the government official is an important actor in the history of social science and the application of social science to psychological operations at the beginning of the Cold War., (© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

While writing a book on the history of postpartum depression in the United States, I became interested in an ongoing study about possible genetic markers of postpartum mental illness. I participated in the first step, an online survey. When I qualified for the next step, saliva collection, I was torn over whether or not to continue. Making this decision required reflecting on some overlapping issues: gender, medicalization, genetic research, and the political functions of DNA donation. In this perspectives essay, I explore tensions around situating myself in my historical research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the more unusual attempts by the American state to mobilize academic expertise unfolded in the late 1930s, when the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) hired scholars in the 'culture and personality' fields and philosophy to aid its efforts to promote economic, social, and cultural change in the countryside. USDA progressives also reached out to disciplinary scholars in other ways as they sought to institute a deliberative mode of planning in local communities and to remake the curricula of the land-grant colleges in support of that project. These USDA initiatives and scholars' responses reveal that scientific knowledge was mobilized in the 1930s not just for the instrumental purpose of regulating economic behavior but also to explain and legitimate federal programs and to inform ambitious projects for cultural change. At the USDA, as at many other sites between the wars, scientific thinkers turned to the social sciences and philosophy in order to understand and then change the public mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1950, the University of California Board of Regents approved a policy that all faculty members, as a condition for continued employment, were required to either sign an oath indicating that they were not members of the Communist Party or explain why they would not sign. A group of faculty members, led by psychologist Edward Tolman, refused to sign the oath and were fired. This article discusses how Tolman emerged as the leader of the faculty nonsigners and how his stature within psychology enabled him to recruit assistance from the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. [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]

This article proposes that the postwar National Science Foundation (NSF) debate constituted a critical, transitional episode in American social science and partisan politics. I show that by responding to powerful conservative critics in the scientific and political communities, the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC's) leading scholars (re)asserted a contested scientistic strategy—to advance the social sciences by following the natural sciences. Further, I reconstruct a wider and longer framework of analysis in order to recover central challenges to the scientistic strategy raised by prominent liberal scholars who rejected the associated commitments to value neutrality and disinterested professionalism. In developing this framework for understanding the contrasting fortunes of each strategy, this article argues that the NSF debate has a deep historical significance—for the social sciences, for American liberalism, and for the nation. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the beginning of the intellectual companionship between the founder of ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel, and Edward Rose, who is most often associated with his program of "ethno-inquiries." I present results from archival research focusing on the contacts and collaborations between Rose and Garfinkel in the years 1955-1965. First, I describe the review process for Rose and Felton's paper, submitted to the American Sociological Review in 1955, which Garfinkel reviewed and after Rose's rebuttal recommended for publication. The paper induced Garfinkel to write an extensive commentary that has remained unpublished. Second, I discuss the 1958 New Mexico conference sponsored by the Air Force, which was an opportunity for Rose and Garfinkel to work together on topics related to common-sense knowledge and scientific knowledge. Third, I give an overview of the ethnomethodological conferences in 1962 and 1963, supported by an Air Force grant written collaboratively by Rose and Garfinkel. Here I focus primarily on Rose's research on "small languages," which stimulated many discussions among the early ethnomethodologists. Rose's work and exchanges with Garfinkel demonstrate the former's affinity for miniaturization as a research approach and search for ways to empiricize topics of sociological theory in locally observable settings., (© 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Since 1970, the “New History” of American psychology has grown into a lively specialty, characterized by tightly focused research utilizing archival source material. The collective product so far is an accumulation of disparate pieces rather than a coherent story. For the future, a debate about critical developments in the discipline's history and their causes appears desirable, in order to produce a more informative analysis of this history. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between the New Psychology and American Protestantism in the late nineteenth century through a consideration of the early career of George Albert Coe. Coe originally aspired to become a Methodist minister but after several years studying evolutionary biology and the New Theology his professional interests came to rest on the New Psychology. His decision to pursue a career in psychology and his subsequent research program is discussed in relation to the religious and institutional context of the period. For Coe, the New Psychology was not an ideologically secular initiative but a methodologically secular means of advancing a religious agenda. His experience suggests that the field's growth in the 1980s is partly attributable to the perception that psychology could help bring Protestantism into line with modern experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the change associated with the department of social science at Columbia University in the 1920s with particular emphasis on the role of Franklin Giddings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the decade surrounding the Second World War, an extensive literature on the biological and psychological basis of aggression surfaced in America, a literature that in general emphasized the significance of learning and environment in the origins of aggressive behavior. Focusing on the animal behavior research of Warder Clyde Allee and John Paul Scott, this paper examines the complex interplay among conceptual, institutional, and societal forces that created and shaped a discourse on the subjects of aggression, dominance, and leadership within the context of World War II. The distinctions made between sexual and social dominance during this period, distinctions accentuated by the threat of totalitarianism attests to the multiplicity of interactions that influence the development of scientific research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an analysis of the mail General Dwight David Eisenhower received while he was president of Columbia University, encouraging him to become a candidate in the 1948 presidential election. Eisenhower's opposition to a military man becoming president; Details on the analysis; Information on the Bureau of Applied Social Research; Details on some of the letters.

Reports developments related to the behavioral sciences in the U.S. as of July 1992. Joint meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science with the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology to be held in Gothenberg, Sweden; Venue of the third International Summer School in History of Science from July 13 to July 24, 1992; Announcement for scholars interested to participate in a panel on Non-Western Perspective on Science and Technology at the 1992 Swedish meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

Presents news and announcements concerning the history of the behavioral sciences as of July 1, 1990. Annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Boston, Massachusetts in August 10-14, 1990; Second International Conference on the History of Human Sciences in Lancaster, England on September 26-29, 1990; Availability of research grants announced by the National Endowment for the Humanities under the category of Humanities, Science and Technology.

Provides an overview of the psychology department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Composition of the university's psychology department; Photograph of the staff of the Clark's psychology department; Graduate students who led mental measurement and child psychology at the university.

The author recalls his days as a graduate student under G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, describing the state of psychology in those early years, his impressions of Hall, and the effect the latter had on his lifework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The background and history of the three major studies that have been made of Middletown (Muncie, Indiana) are traced. The findings of these studies are summarized, their contributions evaluated, and their receptions described. The problems inherent in trying to replicate results over a lengthy span of years in community research are analyzed, concluding with some thoughts on the future of community studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents news on various issues related to behavioral sciences in 2001. Appointment of Joel T. Braslow at the Neuroscience History Archives in University of California at Los Angeles's Brain Research Institute; Information on the Fullbright Scholar Program; List of meetings and programs to be conducted in U.S.

In 1968, Weight Watchers International introduced behavior modification practices to their established commercial program. At the time, the addition of behavioral psychology gave Weight Watchers a distinct advantage over the many competing weight control groups in postwar America. The process of combining group therapy with a controlled diet plan, behavior techniques and later, exercise, has significantly influenced American popular culture. This article considers how the commercialization of group weight control impacted the development and dissemination of a new multidimensional approach for weight management and how this has shaped popular ideas associated with dieting and wider understandings of healthy living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]