Journals of the Century in Sociology

Selecting the “Journals of the Century” in Sociology not only provides an opportunity to closely review the growth and development of the literature of the field, it also provides an opportunity to look at the maturation of the discipline. Although Lee Braude, Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York College at Fredonia, points to arguments that sociology as a way of studying human behavior can be seen as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the development of the field in the United States began in earnest only in the nineteenth century. ¹ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notable similarities in the development of sociology in the United States and in Europe included parallels in the inception of teaching at institutions of higher education along with the recognition of the discipline as a whole. Whether it was the great names, such as Simmel, Durkheim, and Weber on the eastern shores of the Atlantic, or Sumner, Ward, and Small in the United States, the early advocates of the formalized study of sociology were in the classroom at approximately the same time, and all were considering the precepts that Comte and others had laid before them. Further, early discussions of sociology centered as much around the methodology that would be used within the growing discipline, as the theory and practice of sociology itself.