ABSTRACT

Ralph Rosnow held the Thaddeus L. Bolton Professorship in Psychology at Temple University from 1981 to 2001, making his tenure in that post the longest since the honor was established in 1955. During that period, in 1984, I began my graduate training in social psychology with Professor Rosnow. I could hardly have predicted that I would soon be “doing history,” but during my second year I found myself immersed in his work on contextualism and the Pepperian notion that the proper unit of analysis in social psychology should be the transitory historic event in its context (Pepper, 1942/1970). My task was to explore the obscure strand of events running through the history of American psychology that led to the Thaddeus L. Bolton Professorship of Psychology at Temple.