1. Charles Horton Cooley
Best Known For:
•The Looking Glass Self
•Developing the concepts of primary and secondary relationships
•Founding member and eighth president of the American Sociological Association
Birth:
Charles Horton Cooley was born August 17, 1864.
Death:
He died of cancer on May 7, 1929.
2. Early Life And Education:
Cooley was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He graduated from the
University of Michigan in 1887 and returned one year later to study
political economics and sociology.
He began teaching economics and sociology at the University of
Michigan in 1892 and went on to receive his Ph.D. in 1894. He married
Elsie Jones in 1890 with whom he had three children. Cooley preferred
an empirical, observational approach to his research. While he
appreciated the use of statistics, he preferred case studies, often using
his own children as the subjects on his observation.
3. Career and Later Life:
Cooley's first major work, The Theory of Transportation, was in economic theory. This book was
notable for its conclusion that towns and cities tend to be located at the confluence of
transportation routes. Cooley soon shifted to broader analyses of the interplay of individual and
social processes. In Human Nature and the Social Order he foreshadowed George Herbert
Mead's discussion of the symbolic ground of the self by detailing the way in which social
responses affect the emergence of normal social participation.
Cooley greatly extended this conception of the "looking-glass self" in his next book, Social
Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind, in which he sketched a comprehensive approach to
society and its major processes.
4. Whether our beliefs about how others perceive us are true or not, it is those
beliefs that truly shape our ideas about ourselves. Our internalization of the
reactions of others towards us is more important than reality. Further, this
self-idea has three principle elements: our imagination of how others see
our appearance; our imagination of the other’s judgment of our appearance;
and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification, determined by
our imagination of the other’s judgment of us.
Other Major Publications
•Life and the Student (1927)
•Social Process (1918)
•Sociological Theory and Social Research (1930)
5. Jane addams
Jane Addams Facts
Known for: founding of Hull-House; her work was foundational
to the social work profession
Occupation: settlement house reformer, pacifist, women's rights
advocate
Dates: September 6, 1860 - May 21, 1935
Also Known as: Laura Jane Addams
6. Jane Addams Biography
Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, Illinois. Her mother died when she was two, and she was
raised by her father and, later, a stepmother, Anna Haldeman.
Her father was an active politician as well as a wealthy businessman and active church member.
He was one of the founders of the Republican Party, elected to the Illinois State Senate from that
party in 1854 and serving until 1870.
Jane Addams graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881, among the first students there
to take a course of study equivalent to that of men at other institutions. She was valedictorian.
Her father, whom she admired tremendously, died that same year, 1881.
Jane Addams attended Woman's Medical College in Pennsylvania, but she left the college,
probably due to her ill health and her chronic back pain. Jane Addams toured Europe 1883-5 and
then lived in Baltimore 1885-7, but did not figure out what she wanted to do with her education
and her skills.
7. Settlement House
In 1888, on a visit to England with her Rockford classmate Ellen Gates Starr, Jane Addams visited
Toynbee Settlement Hall and London's East End. Jane Addams and Ellen Starr planned to start an
American equivalent of that settlement house. After their return they chose Hull mansion, a building which,
though originally built at the edge of the city, had become surrounded by an immigrant neighborhood and
was by then run down and being used as a warehouse.
Using an experimental model of reform -- trying solutions to see what would work, adapting as experiments
worked or didn't -- and committed to full- and part-time residents to keep in touch with the neighborhood's
real needs, Jane Addams quickly built Hull-House into an institution known worldwide. Much of her funding
came from wealthy women in Chicago. Addams wrote articles, lectured widely and did most of the fund-
raising personally and served on many social work, social welfare and settlement house boards and
commissions. Her approach, which also stressed the role of women in social welfare, was sometimes
called social feminism.
Her first conception of the settlement house as a place for educated women to raise the cultural level of the
poor fairly quickly evolved into an understanding that social services like child care, visiting services, rooms
for young working women, and classes for immigrants were more important. She developed her ideas into
a robust theory of democracy as the empowerment of and participation of all members of the community.
8. More Social Reform
The Pullman strike of 1894, following a depression the year before, brought Addams' attention to the larger
issues behind the individual struggles of those who were poor.
Her 1894 essay, A Modern Lear, analyzed the Pullman Strike by comparing George Pullman to King
Lear. She became involved in the Progressive movement and its wider efforts for social reform, including
housing and sanitation issues, factory inspection, rights of immigrants, women and children, pacifism and
the 8-hour day.
The work of Addams and the residents of Hull-House to survey the neighborhood carefully, published as
Hull-House Maps and Papers in 1895, was key in the founding of the scientific study of social
conditions. Her emphasis on not just data collection, but acting on the results, helped shape the early
profession of social work.
She worked closely with University of Chicago faculty. John Dewey not only taught Greek philosophy to
the Greek immigrant men coming to Hull House, but consulted with Addams on her work, and named his
daughter after Addams.
Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, also at the University of Chicago, drew Addams into
influencing the early years of the School of Social Work at the University.
She served as a Vice President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1911-1914.
In 1912, Jane Addams campaigned for the Progressive Party and its presidential candidate, Teddy
Roosevelt. She worked with the Peace Party, helped found and served as president (1919-1935) of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and was a founding member of the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU).
9. More About Jane Addams
Family Background:
•Father: John Huy Addams
•Mother: Sarah Weber
Places: Cedarville, Illinois; Chicago, Illinois.
Organizations: Hull-House, settlement house movement, National Woman Suffrage Association, Anti-Imperialist League,
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Nobel Prize
In 1931 Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Nicholas Murray Butler, but her health was
too fragile to attend the European ceremonies to accept the prize. She was the second woman to be awarded that
honor.
Jane Addams died in 1935.
Books by Jane Addams, many of which were edited compilations of earlier essays and magazine articles, include
Twenty Years at Hull-House and Democracy and Social Ethics.
In 1963, most of the buildings which had come to be included in what was called Hull-House were torn down to
make room for the University of Illinois, Chicago campus (then called Circle campus). All that is left today is the
original mansion and one more building. These are now used as a museum and educational site.
10. Robert K. Merton
Best Known For:
•Developing theories of deviance
•Developing the concepts of "self-fulfilling prophecy" and "role model"
•Considered one of America's most influential social scientists
Birth:
Robert K. Merton was born July 4, 1910.
Death:
He died February 23, 2003.
11. Early Life and Education:
Robert K. Merton was born Meyer R. Schkolnick in Philadelphia into a working class Eastern European Jewish
Immigrant family.
He changed his name at the age of 14 to Robert Merton, which evolved out of a teenage career as an amateur
magician as he blended the names of famous magicians. Merton attended Temple College for undergraduate work
and Harvard for graduate work, studying sociology at both and earning his doctorate degree in 1936.
Major Publications
•Social Theory and Social Structure (1949)
•The Sociology of Science (1973)
•Sociological Ambivalence (1976)
•On The Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (1985)
•On Social Structure and Science
12. Career and Later Life:
Merton taught at Harvard until 1938 when he became professor and chairman of the Department of Sociology at Tulane
University. In 1941 he joined the Columbia University faculty where he was named to the University's highest academic rank,
University Professor, in 1974. In 1979 Merton retired from the University and became an adjunct faculty member at Rockefeller
University and was also the first Foundation Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He retired from teaching altogether in 1984.
Merton received many awards and honors for his research. He was one of the first sociologists elected to the National Academy
of Sciences and the first American sociologists to be elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
In 1994, he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founding the sociology of
science. He was the first sociologist to receive the award. Throughout his career, more than 20 universities awarded him
honorary degrees, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Chicago as well as several universities abroad.
He is also credited as the creator of the focus group research method.
Merton was very passionate about the sociology of science and was interested in the interactions and importance between social
and cultural structures and science. He carried out extensive research in the field, developing the Merton Thesis, which explained
some of the causes of the Scientific Revolution. His other contributions to the field deeply shaped and helped developed fields
such as the study of bureaucracy, deviance, communications, social psychology, social stratification, and social structure. Merton
was also one of the pioneers of modern policy research, studying things such as housing projects, the use of social research by
the AT&T Corporation, and medical education.
