William Graham Sumner, a founder of sociology and a brilliant anthropological theorist of normative order, was strongly influenced by the writings of the British evolutionist Herbert Spencer. Sumner was born in Paterson, New Jersey on October 30, 1840. He studied political economy and graduated from Yale University (1863). He studied French and Hebrew at the
William Smith was born on March 23, 1769 in Churchill, Oxfordshire, England, the first son of five children of the village blacksmith. He had a meager formal education but had a natural curiosity concerning local rocks, fossils, and geography. When he was eight years old, his father died, leaving the family in dire circumstances and
Sir William Jones was a British polymath whose scholarly research and vision were critical to both modern linguistics and Indology. In his founding of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784 and the journal Asiatic Researches, Jones set forth a broad, interdisciplinary program of research in Indian languages, religions, history, law, natural history, medicine, and
“Si” Goode was born in Houston, Texas in 1917. He died in 2003, holding the position of Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. In his career, he held many distinguished positions within academia, including his election as 63rd president of the American Sociological Association, in 1970. Goode earned a long list of academic awards
Dr. William Ernst Engelbrecht, the son of Waldo Ernst Engelbrecht and Margaret Patricia Schall, is an archaeologist whose primary focus continues to be on Northern Iroquoian peoples. After completing his bachelor of arts in anthropology at Northwestern University (1965), where he studied under Sally Binford, Paul Bohanen, Ronald Cohen, Creighton Gable, Bruce Trigger, and Oswald
William E. Cross, Jr., is an African American social psychologist who is best known for his Nigrescence model of Black racial identity. The power of Cross’s original Nigrescence model, which was first articulated in 1971, is evident by its adoption in the theorizing about other cultural identities, including minority, racial, ethnic, feminist, womanist, and gay/lesbian