Howard W. Odum

Howard Washington Odum (1884 to 1954) was an American sociologist and author who studied African-American life and folklore and became the leading sociologist of the American South of his day. Born in Bethlehem, Georgia, he took a doctorate in psychology under G. Stanley Hall at Clark University and a second in sociology at Columbia, where he studied with Franklin Henry Giddings. From 1920 he taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he founded the School of Public Welfare, the University of North Carolina Press, the journal Social Forces in 1922 and the institute that now bears his name in 1924. His books include An Introduction to Social Research (1929), Southern Regions of the United States (1936) and Race and Rumors of Race (1943), and he served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1930. His work on folk society and regionalism resists classification under a single discipline, and his sons Eugene and Howard T. Odum both became ecologists.