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Hattie Plum Williams (1878-1963), Michael R. Hill, Mary Jo Deegan

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The professional life of Hattie Plum Williams unfolded on the geographically isolated Great Plains of eastern Nebraska. She is the first woman known to chair a coeducational, doctoral department of sociology, and as the author of major studies on Russian German immigrants, she made significant disciplinary contributions to sociology. As a woman caught between changing definitions of the division of labor in sociology during the 1920s, she often is characterized as a social worker, although her professional allegiance remained to sociology. Williams epitomized the first generation of professional women sociologists on the Great Plains.

The Pre-Paradigmatic Ideology Of Explained Variance In Sociology, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This discussion was originally conceived for presentation in one of the several MSS sections on quantitative methods. My project, however, was the only one for which the organizer of the quantitative sessions could not find a slot. In fact, he neither told me my proposal was rejected nor communicated my name or abstract to the MSS program chair. It. matters to me little whether this was by design or accident -- the result was the same. Were it not for Susan Wright.'s active response to my belated inquiries about the status of my participation in these meetings – and her …

Lucile Eaves (1869-1953), Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Lucile Eaves was a research and applied sociologist, a professor, and an activist. She was fired by a desire to change women's status and that of laborers, anticipating the contemporary concern with the structural ties between class and sex. She worked in the South Park Social Settlement of San Francisco, and as a faculty member at Stanford University, the University of Nebraska, and Simmons College. Her work for the Women's Educational and Industrial Union generated numerous quantitative studies of women's lives in a variety of contexts. She is one of the first sociologists to study medical sociology, especially women with …

Selected Quotations From Harriet Martineau, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Becoming Mature: Childhood Ghosts And Spirits In Adult Life, By Valerie Malhotra Bentz., Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Bentz's work will appeal to many sociologists, including those with interests in contemporary theory, family studies, clinical sociology, and research methodologies. This useful and intellectually stimulating volume appears in the Communications and Social Order series, edited by David Maines. Peter Manning provides the foreword (pp. xiii-xvi).

Bentz builds on an impressive foundation of classical and contemporary theorists, including George Herbert Mead, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Schutz, Jiirgen Haberrnas, and Norman Denzin. Some readers will be outraged by Bentz's conscious joining of symbolic interactionist concepts with ideas from psychoanalytic traditions. But readers who admire Haberrnas' recent transformations of …

The Centennial Ethic And The Spirit Of Archivalism, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

My thinking about the possible relationships between centennials and archives was prompted first by my own work on archives and archival methodology (Hill 1989, 1990, Forthcoming) and second by the upcoming centennial of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2005. It is to the centennial of the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas, however, to which I owe the specific impetus to prepare this paper. I am very pleased, as a neighbor from Nebraska, to celebrate with you the founding of the world's very first department of sociology at the University of Kansas (Sica 1983). We are, of …

Edith Abbott (1876-1957), Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Abbott was the first woman dean of a graduate school in an American university and, simultaneously, the first dean of the first graduate school of social work in the nation. Her leading role in social work overshadowed her deep roots in sociology, in which she was a major scholar of her day. She was a prolific author (Marks 1958) and specialized in the study of women's rights and wages. Her life was dedicated to the eradication of social inequality facing blacks, immigrants, people in poverty, and laborers. Abbott championed the use of statistical data at the University of Chicago during …

Review Of The Role And Nature Of The Doctoral Dissertation, By The Council Of Graduate Schools, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This brief, impressively sponsored report overflows with Machiavellian subtexts, bureaucratic rationalizations, and mendacious platitudes. While concluding that the doctoral dissertation "defines the essence of the PhD degree" (p. 31), the overall message is that doctoral dissertations have become all things to all disciplines and that-further-this diversity of options is legitimate and virtually inexorable. The shock to my academic sensibilities on reading this official policy statement of the Council of Graduate Schools is the realization (once again) that some of our colleagues in several of the engineering, natural, and physical sciences have thoroughly subverted the doctoral process, turning it into a …

Review Of David And Judith Willer, Systematic Empiricism: Critique Of A Pseudoscience (Englewood Cliffs, Nj, 1973), Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Mainstream sociology, tvpically qrounded in data generated by survey questionnaire techniques in tandem with systematic statistical analysis of correlations between ad hot, arbitrarily selected (or, at best, very loosely rationalized) variables (i.e, empirical categories) is the very opposite of genuine (i.e., logically rationalized and philosophically defensible) scientific research. In essence, the Willers argue from a formalist platform standard sociological methods and statistics courses are scientifically worthless and that the novice sociologist who hungers after the “latest statistical techniques” and/or longs for a "good data set to analyze" is fundamentally an idiot who will nonetheless be showered with grant money and …

Alice S. Rossi (1922 – )., Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Alice S. Rossi is a Renaissance scholar. She is a leader in several specialties within sociology and between sociology and other disciplines. Her studies of women, occupations, the family, the life course, sociobiography, and socialization bring together work and ideas from sociology, biology, history, psychology, and anthropology. Her far-ranging academic interests are matched by her influence in the wider society and within professional circles.

Doctoral Dissertations As Liminal Journeys Of The Self: Betwixt And Between In Graduate Sociology Programs, Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The sociology dissertation process is a liminal journey, a passage characterized by ambiguity, uncertainty, and crisis in which the student self is abandoned and a new professional self claims a world of power. authority, maturity, and responsibility. The theoretical perspectives of Victor Turner, Arnold Van Gennep, and George H. Mead are extended to conceptualize the “liminal self who undertakes this difficult and problematic journey of transformation. Experiential methodology, in which theory and autobiography are combined, is employed to explicate the dissertation as a conflictful rite de passage and to critique doctoral projects that unrefexively adopt “technical formulas” for success and …

Bureaucracy, Institutional Change, And Deegan’S Theory Of Core Codes And Liberating Rituals, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In American Ritual Dramas: Social Rules and Cultural Meanings (Greenwood Press, 1989), Mary Jo Deegan presents a theory of core codes and communitas that implicitly challenges the present organization of sociological practice in bureaucratic structures such as universities. The rituals of modern academic sociology are permeated by the same core codes that Deegan finds in many modern participatory and media-constructed rituals, specifically: the codes of oppression (class and sex codes) and the codes of repression (bureaucracy and time codes). Sociology remains little more than a rationalization for repressive and oppressive social control mechanisms unless it convincingly demonstrates and acts upon …

Excavating Underappreciated Sociologists: A Survey Of Assumptions And Strategies In Archival Research, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Archivally-based research in the history and sociology of sociology (especially the recent work of Mary Jo Deegan on Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918) powerfully demonstrates the central epistemological importance of excavating and rehabilitating the contributions of sociologists who have long been ignored by historians of sociology. Archival experience reveals that uncovering the unknown, the unwritten, or the unrecognized in the history of sociology frequently requires reversing the conventional wisdoms of sociological research. Ten archival research strategies are identified. These approaches are best adapted to long-term rather than short-term research programs. It is concluded that. the …

Empiricism And Reason In Harriet Martineau’S Sociology, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The architecture and evolution of Harriet Martineau's sociological epistemology epitomize an essential tension between abstract theory and concrete empiricism. The body of Martineau's intellectual work demonstrates a major conceptual shift, from early religious convictions to subsequent rejection of all metaphysical systems. How to Observe Morals and Manners lies midway in this journey. The epistemological and biographical route to Martineau's adamant repudiation of metaphysics was long, personally tumultuous, and grounded fundamentally in empirical studies of social conditions. I focus here on the give-and-take between metaphysics, empiricism, and rationality in Harriet Martineau's sociological work. Part one of this essay highlights the major …

Dramaturgy In Archival Research: A Frame Analysis Of Disciplinary Reconstruction In Sociology, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Research in the history of sociology has with few exceptions depended primarily on interviews, reminiscences, and information gleaned from published sources rather than upon archival data such as unpublished correspondence, manuscripts, diaries, and memos. Recently, however, Mary Jo Deegan (1988) and others have demonstrated the power of archival data for rehabilitating the history of American sociology. Archival research is not without its own set of pitfalls and problems, but archival data can at times provide needed corrections to the skewed and often self-serving historical images portrayed in many of the "standard" published accounts of our disciplinary history.

The Presentation Of The City On ‘Fat-Letter’ Postcards, Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Media-constructed rituals are cultural products. Unlike participatory rituals, my focus thus far, media-constructed rituals have more stability, higher internal order and consistency, and greater potential to reach people over time. Cultural artifacts from the past can reach people in their own era, the present, and the future, and in this way they provide a source of continuity even for rapidly changing societies. We begin this section of the book by examining a small artifact in an interaction ritual, the presentation of the city on a particular style of postcard.

Cities are complex human environments that are frequently symbolized in the …

Roscoe Pound’S Sociological Library: The Foundations Of American Sociological Jurisprudence, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Roscoe Pound was an interdisciplinarian of the first order. His active reformation of legal thought and administrative practice in the United States was grounded in careful study of European and American legal and social theorists. He read widely in the discipline of sociology, as the following bibliography of his personal sociological book collection attests. Pound's study of sociology reached more widely and deeply than cursory examination of his published work reveals.

This bibliographic essay introduces modern scholars to the theoretical and intellectual contributions of the discipline of sociology to the foundations of twentieth-century juristic thought in the United States as …

American Charities As The Herald To A New Age, Mary Jo Deegan

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The publication of American Charities in 1894 signaled the start of a new age. It crystallized the views of men and women working in economics, sociology, history, and philanthropy. Massive social changes-in urbanization, industrialization, immigration, the roles of women, and the relation between the home and the marketplace-generated social strains that could not be accommodated by traditional world views. Social problems in this new situation, particularly poverty, were perceived increasingly as secular instead of religious issues. Solutions to these social problems were needed urgently, and Amos G. Warner, the author of American Charities, articulated a new vision amidst the …

Mari Sandoz’ Sociological Imagination: Capital City As An Ideal Type, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This paper examines Mari Sandoz' (1939) novel Capital City from the perspective of sociology. ‘I outline Sandoz' data collection methods and consider her use of ideal-type analysis and sociological imagination. From the perspective of literary critics it may be, as Helen Stauffer (1982: 131) judged, that Capital City "is not a successful novel." It is not my purpose, however, to contest the merit of Sandoz' work on literary grounds. Rather, I invoke the viewpoint of the sociologist and note the criteria on which I conclude that Capital City is a complex and well-executed sociological study.

What It Means To Be A Humanist Sociologist: A Socioautobiographical Perspective, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

I am delighted to speak to you as a representative of the Association for Humanist Sociology. It is my purpose today to acquaint you with the Association for Humanist Sociology, to prompt your queries about the Association, and to answer your questions concerning the ways in which our organization supports the humanist values and professional interests of students and practicing sociologists across the country. Prior to talking about the “nuts and bolts” of the Association’s history and member services, however, I turn to my central topic for today: a socioautobiographical perspective on what it means to be a humanist sociologist.

Framing ‘Bomb Talk’: The Macro Consequences Of The Microfoundations Of Social Interaction In A Goffmanian Nuclear World, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This paper, originating with issues generated in Professor Deegan’s seminar on contemporary sociological theory at the University of Nebraska, explores the “frames” or microfoundations of everyday interaction and their consequences for the ultimate macrosociological threat: global nuclear annihilation. The theoretical basis of this study is Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. The adequacy and comprehensiveness of Goffman’s major constructs are substantiated by data from the everyday world of newspapers and popular culture. “Keys” (or transformational conventions) are pivotal in this analysis. The central thesis of this paper holds that the keys used to transformationally …

We’Re Partners – Not Husband And Wife, Mary Jo Deegan, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

On May I, 1982- International Workers' Day-we celebrated and consecrated our relationship with friends and family. Our partnership ceremony included blessings by a Presbyterian minister, piano music played by a close friend, and readings by Frederick Engels on marriage as slavery for women and by Jane Addams on the right of all people to live in societies they created. We did not obtain a marriage license, we did not exchange "marriage vows," and we specifically chose to not be married. Our celebration cake was covered with white frosting and in red letters the slogan "Workers Should Unite-Not Marry" merrily conveyed …

Preface To The Special Issue, Mary Jo Deegan

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Nebraska was a tumultuous new state in 1869, the year its major University was founded. The early sociologists at Nebraska reflected this bumptious and daring spirit This special issue of the Mid-American Review of Sociology explores several facets of the intellectual heritage and institutional foundations of sociology at the University of Nebraska.

Editor’S Introduction: The Social Construction Of A Departmental Heritage, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The creation, maintenance, and diffusion of each academic department's corporate identity is a social project. This is as true for departments of sociology as for any other academic organization. Numerous individuals and organizations -- within and outside a particular institute of higher learning -participate in the constructive, reconstructive, and deconstructive processes that shape the content and character of the institutional heritage passed from one generation of scholars in each department of sociology to the next.

Framing Falls: A Goffmanian Analysis Of Pedestrian Falls And Muffings, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Roscoe Pound And The Seminarium Botanicum At The University Of Nebraska, 1888-1889, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Roscoe Pound (1870-1964) became one of America's leading legal scholars, but few recall his rigorous training in botany. Those who do most often cite his 1898 joint doctoral thesis (The Phytogeography of Nebraska, co-authored with Frederic Clements), but fail to note his first graduate work of a decade earlier. Roscoe Pound's master's thesis, "The Imperfect Fungi of Nebraska," was researched and written during the 1888-1889 academic year. Although the thesis itself is now lost, its content and the circumstances under which it was written can be established by using archival materials. Pound's role in leading the student botanical club (the …

Early Women Sociologists At The University Of Nebraska: A Selective Bibliography, Mary Jo Deegan

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This working bibliography provides a key to the large literature written by early women sociologists from the University of Nebraska for those who wish to know more about their writings.

MARY ADELL TREMAIN (1860-1921)

FRANCES BROWN TAYLOR (1861-1925)

LUCILLE EAVES (1869-1949)

EDITH ABBOTT (1876-1957)

LUCILLE EAVES (1869-1949)

HATTIE PLUM WILLIAMS (1878-1963)

ALICE MARIE LOOMIS (1880-1982)

LETA S. HOLLINGWORTH (1886-1939)

GWENDOLYN HUGHES (1895-1911)

Review Of Sociology: A Brief But Critical Introduction, 2nd Edition, By Anthony Giddens, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

As Giddens announces correctly in the preface, "This book differs from most other introductory texts in sociology in several ways" (p. vii). It concentrates on theory, "the core of theoretical concerns which sociology shares with all the social sciences" (p. vii). Giddens asserts, "I do not adopt the usual view that these issues are unimportant to those seeking to achieve an initial acquaintance with sociology. Neither do I accept the equally common idea that such matters are too complex to be grasped before the reader has a mastery of the more empirical content of the subject" (pp. vii-viii). On the …

Research By Bureaucracy: Hattie Plum Williams And The National Commission On Law Observance And Enforcement, 1929-1931, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

This paper explores the bureaucratized research activities (1929-1931) of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (NCLOE) from the perspective of Hattie Plum Williams' sociobiographical experience. Williams was a doctoral student of George E. Howard and earned her Ph.D. in 1915 -- the ftrst doctorate in sociology awarded by the University of Nebraska. That same year, she joined the Nebraska faculty and eventually became Chair of the Department (1922-1928).2 In 1931, at age 53, this full professor was called upon be an unpaid fieldworker, gathering data according to rigid protocols stipulated by the NCLOE. Archival reconstruction of Williams' "view …

The Intellectual Legacy Of Nebraska Sociology: A Bibliographical Chronology Of Separately Published Works, 1887-1989, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

The ftrst full century of sociological scholarship at the University of Nebraska rests solidly on numerous contributions to the acknowledged pinnacle of academic work: single-author monographs published by scholarly presses. Collaborative works, including jointly-authored monographs and scholarly editorial projects, round out the separately published volumes in the continually growing library of Nebraska sociology. Several works are recognized classics and have been revised and revived in various editions. The sociological work flowing from Nebraska roots is evidenced by inspection of the bibliography below.

If one wished to deftne a "Nebraska school of sociology," one could do worse than look to the …