 This presentation is to give you a little bit of background as you watch the history videos and look at the wiki pages regarding historical figures and sociology. Sociology came into being in the early 1800s in the 19th century. Before there was sociology, there were people who asked the question, what makes a good society or how do people get along or what is the best way for people to interact with each other? But most of the time they were asking these questions either from a philosophical or a religious point of view and there were a number of superstitions and myths around what is the best way to interact and so forth. When the 19th century came into being, it was a period of time that is quite remarkable. At the beginning of the 19th century and 1800, getting around transportation was basically horse, buggy, foot, sailboat, rowboat, not very fast, not very far. It was also equally difficult to communicate over long distances. Because basically you sent messages via foot, horseback or sail to get to somebody. So the length of time it took you to get someplace was also the length of time it took you to get a message someplace. By the end of the 19th century and 1900 and actually by 1903, let's say, you have a vast array of new developments in both communications and transportation. You have the invention of the steam engine. You have the invention of the locomotive. You have, by the end of the 19th century, a considerable advancement in making automobiles and by 1903 you actually have the first time people fly. So we were well on our way by the end of the 19th century to have the kind of easy traveling that we have now. In addition to that, there was a number of telegraph wires crossing back and forth across the United States. We had wireless radio and we were well on our way to having wireless communication. And we also had the invention of the telephone. So certainly by the end of the 19th century we're well on our way to having much faster means of communicating with each other. There is a philosopher who in the 20th century looking back over the 19th century said that the greatest invention of the 19th century was the invention. And what he meant by that was that during the 19th century there was a belief that if you took scientific testing, testing hypotheses, testing theories, using the scientific method, that you could solve human problems, that you could make life better for human beings. And it's kind of hard on this side of the atom bomb to imagine this, but during that period of time it was, in fact, an incredible belief that science could be the solver of problems and in that a number of people thought that perhaps science could be the solver of social problems as well. And that is where sociology was born. It is, in fact, the idea of the science of society or the science of human relationships. In addition to that, the 19th century had a great deal of social upheaval. Right before the beginning of the 19th century in 1776 we have the American Revolution. In Europe we had a number of revolutionary things going on including the French revolutions. There was a number of people who were writing books and discussing things, who talked a great deal about new ideas, new thought. And the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. People were inventing new things on the time. Quite a few people were lamenting the passing of the old and embracing the promise of the new. And as such, they created a kind of fear and also a kind of curiosity about what society might be about. And as such then it was a kind of intersection of both the methodology and the curiosity to actually start studying how human beings interact with each other in a scientific manner. So as you think about and read about these historical figures, I want you to note that there is a kind of tension that has developed in sociology over the years. Especially the early thinkers were very much into understanding how does the society develop? How do people actually create groups and interact in groups? And as that information came into being, other people were beginning to ask, how can we use sociology to create a better society? So the social development emphasis was on studying the past. What has happened? How did it happen? Why does it work that way? Where the social expansion emphasis was on studying the future. What can we do to make things better? As you could probably guess, most of the people who were interested in social development were functionalists in the way that they thought. They were functionalists because they were interested in how does it work? Where social expansion emphasized more of a conflict theory approach because they were constantly trying to figure out where the social problems were that needed to be solved. Social development emphasized objectivity. Meaning that they were interested in developing facts, developing theories, and developing evidence that supported those theories. Where social expansion was interested in subjectivity, they wanted to know how do people experience their everyday life? How do they experience society? So social development emphasized the scientific. They were very much interested in putting together theories and research papers and so forth that could be published in journals and seen from an academic perspective. Where social expansion was more interested in activism, they wanted to know how does this change a policy? How does this create a program? How does this make things better for the people within a community or within a society? Social development then concentrated on research and sort of padded themselves on the back when they in fact had created something that got published and got read by other researchers and added to a body of scientific knowledge. Where social expansion emphasized everyday life, they tested what they were doing by the question, are things better? Are people having their lives improved? Is society getting better? So social development was interested in theory and social expansion was interested in reform. And you should as you look at all of these different thinkers be able to see this tension develop through the through the two centuries that sociology has been in existence. You may also notice that there aren't a whole lot of historical figures who did a lot of work after the 1960s. The reason for that is that by the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s sociology became very firmly academic and also very professionalized. By that I mean that people who got degrees in sociology regarded themselves as having a particular discipline, a particular specialization and regarded themselves as teachers and as researchers, occasionally also regarding themselves as activists, but did not think of themselves as theorists or people who were asking the big questions. Part of what drove this is that the academy started having research and funding shortages. So professors had more and more pressure put on them to do research projects that could be funded and of course that skews it in the direction of being somewhat conservative. It is difficult to find funding for more radical ideas and it pushed it from what we call big T theory, which is asking big questions like how do we study values or what is, you know, what would make the perfect society or something like that to little T theory, which are questions like why do poor kids have asthma more often than more wealthy children? So the little T theory questions are not, you know, bad questions. They can be quite useful and helpful, but we've sort of let go of the bigger questions about society, about how we interact with each other, about how we can build a more perfect society. The other thing that's happened since the 1960s is that you have far more women going into the discipline than you had before. This is in part because there are far more women going to college than before, but also I would suggest that it might have to do with the fact that sociology doesn't pay as much as it once did and oftentimes when you see a feminization of a certain discipline or profession, what you see is lower income. So women tend to accept lower income in things than men do. And the last point is something called post-modernism, which you really don't need to know a lot about, but I want to mention it because it has been influential in sociology, especially in the 1990s and around the turn of the 21st century. And that is the idea that we are past thinking of science as a savior or as a all-encompassing solver of human problems. There's a lot more to post-modernism than that, and if you're interested in it, please go ahead and look it up. You'll see that it comes from the arts, from linguistics, from literature, and so forth. The way that it's influenced sociology is that sociologists have started concentrating more on meaning and thinking about how people speak with each other and how meaning is developed. So certainly post-modernism has influenced what we call symbolic interactionism or constructionist points of view. But I mostly tell you this because I don't, you know, you may run into it and I want you to know that it exists out there it will not be on a test or be important to you. So be sure to watch the videos and read the wiki pages with the things that we've discussed here in mind.