A QUESTION OF PRIORITY: SMALL AT CHICAGO OR BLACKMAR AT KANSAS?

The goal of this paper is twofold. The first is to point out that American sociologists, as indicated in textbooks and published scholarly papers, often confuse the history of sociology as a profession with the history of social thought, so that the first is totally absorbed in the second with detrimental effects to both. The second goal concerns demonstrating that our understanding of sociology's growth in the U.S. during the late 19th century is not as accurate as it might be were documents of the period examined more carefully than has typically been the! case. As an example of this faulty historiography, the widely held contention that the University of Chicago sociology department was "the first" to be founded in the U.S. is shown to be untrue. A case is made for Frank Blackmar's efforts at the University of Kansas as prior to Small's, and in some ways equally fascinating regarding the scope and definition of the discipline in its earliest days. The point, then, of the paper is to help reinterest American sociologists in the history of their profession as distinct from the history of its ideology or theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]