ABSTRACT
Historians and sociologists frequently complain about the puny results of their interdisciplinary efforts, but few ever do anything about it. Every now and then, it looks as though a rapprochement is at band. The fields of concentration offered by graduate sociology departments only rarely include courses that apply the sociological perspective to history. A major obstacle to interdisciplinary cooperation is the fact that historical sociology will require the historian who is oriented to traditional methods to drastically alter his approach. Indeed, one reason for the anti-sociology bias is the sociologist's slight of uniqueness in favor of generalizations about classes of phenomena. The Columbia department produced a few doctoral dissertations in historical sociology but the new specialty did not really catch on in sociology as a whole. Graduate training in sociology rarely includes any self-conscious attempts to give students the sophistication to ask questions about social change or the skills to answer them.
