Introduction: On Becoming and Being a Historical Sociologist of

This book represents an unprecedented comprehensive refl ective history of Blacks in American sociology from the late 1860s to the 1990s, based upon papers I have written and mostly published over a span of nearly 30 years on the subject. By refl ective history I mean an examination in historical sociology of knowledge of the patronage and the political, economic, and social contextualizing environments that shaped both academic and non-academic thinking about black experiences in the United States from the end of the American Civil War through the 1990s, with particular focus on the rise of the scientifi c study of Blacks prior to World War II.