Albion Woodbury Small

Albion Woodbury Small (1854 to 1926) was an American sociologist who founded the first independent department of sociology in the United States, at the University of Chicago in 1892, and helped establish sociology as a valid field of academic study. Born in Buckfield, Maine, he studied at Colby University, trained in theology at the Andover Newton Theological School and then studied history, social economics and politics at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin. He taught at Colby College, took his doctorate at the Johns Hopkins University in 1889 and was the tenth president of Colby from 1889 to 1892. At Chicago he chaired the sociology department for over thirty years and served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature from 1905 to 1925. With George E. Vincent he published An Introduction to the Study of Society in 1894, the first sociology textbook, and in 1895 he established the American Journal of Sociology, the first sociology journal in the United States. His later books include General Sociology (1905) and Origins of Sociology (1921).