ABSTRACT
Progressivism was a largely city-based political reform movement, which began in the 1890s and, effectively, ended with the First World War. Progressivism was also a broad reorientation of thought away from the chaos and the inequities of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism towards modern, progressive liberalism. The new Zeitgeist could be seen in the rationalizing of the economy, and, less visibly, in the disciplining of knowledge within new spheres of professional life: city planning, dominated by Daniel Burnham; the law, where legal realism was promoted by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr; social work, in which Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement were pioneers; and, in university departments: sociology (Lester Ward and, in the second decade and 1920s, the Chicago School headed by Robert Park); the new history (James Harvey Robinson, Frederick Jackson Turner, and then Charles Beard); anthropology (Franz Boas); education (John Dewey); and philosophy (William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana at Harvard and John Dewey at Chicago and then at Columbia).
