ABSTRACT
The relationship between history and sociology was a distant one. Before the last decade or two, it was nearly inconceivable that projects could be formed in which members of the two disciplines might work amicably and fruitfully together. Historians were prone to say that what was valid in sociology was already incorporated in their discipline, had been since Herodotus, and what was left in sociology they did not want. The original relationship between history and sociology in the United States. It is unnecessary to dwell even briefly on the transformation of American sociology beginning in the period between 1910 and 1920 with the works of such men as Cooley, Ross, and Thomas and working on a widening front to the modern conception of sociology as the study of social systems. For sociology the central problem was that of change. Almost without exception the works of the pioneers of American sociology—such men as Ward, Sumner, and Gid-dings—were oriented toward the discovery of laws of development.
