ABSTRACT
As 1985 marks the hundredth anniversary of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance, an investigation of the intellectual origins of organized physical education in the United States seems appropriate. Thomas Haskell's work concerning professionalization is a useful source for beginning such an investigation. In The Emergence of Professional Social Science, Haskell argues that members of the American Social Science Association (founded in 1865) represented ‘the last generation of amateur social scientists’. Their ‘non-scientific’ mode of enquiry was ‘precisely what the first generation of fully professional social scientists were fighting against when they began to construct the modern disciplines of history, economics, political science, and sociology’. [ 1 ]
