The Journal of the History of Sociology: Its Origins and Scope.

This article presents information related to Jack Nusan Porter who is a former research associate at Harvard University and a former professor of social science at Boston University. He founded the Journal of the History of Sociology (JHS), and several other projects in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts in a burst of creativity between jobs. He discovered later that year also marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the first course in sociology at Yale and taught by William Graham Sumner. This was not the first history of sociology journal nor will it, hopefully, be the last. The time seemed right in 1976 because sociology and especially, the American Sociological Association (ASA), the major sociological, professional group in the world, did not seem interested in its own history. He once asked an ASA officer if she could tell him how long (how many years) members were actually members of the organization, and she could not tell him. Even archives were disorganized. There was no central location. The University of Chicago had some relevant holdings; Pennsylvania State University under Alan Sica had some; the University of Nebraska under Mary Jo Deegan and Michael Hill were other sources; the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada was a fourth source; but most holdings were scattered all over the country, unknown to most scholars.