American Social Science Association Research Articles

Play, Games and Cognitive Development: Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Physicians, Neurologists, Psychologists and Others Already Knew What Researchers Are Proclaiming Today

‘Exercise and Children’s Intelligence, Cognition, and Academic Achievement’, which appeared in the Educational Psychology Review in 2008, is only one of a growing number of recent studies that support the assertion that physical activity is important for cognitive development. Most people today are probably unaware that more than 100 years ago, numerous physicians, neurologists, psychologists and physical educators already knew this. In 1876 neurologist James J. Putman (who had studied in England with the noted neurologist John Hughlings Jackson) had advocated the initiation of public school physical education. At the same American Social Science Association meeting physician David F. Lincoln stated that both manual training (the more ‘applied’ form of motor activity) and gymnastics (the ‘more pure kinetic’ form) are essential parts of a child’s education. Many of their contemporaries expressed similar views. One of these was the noted turn-of-the century psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who wrote often about the importance of play, games and educationally oriented sports for both physical health and neurological development. Others understood the importance of creating the school-based and community programmes that were needed to make what researchers were finding – and asserting – a reality. Physical education was increasingly made part of the curriculum. By 1904 most of the more than 100 ‘settlement houses’ in the USA included recreational and sports programmes for children, youth and often adults. Following its founding in 1906, the Playground Association of America became a major force in extending such work. By the 1920s, the needed programmes had grown extensively. As Michael O’Shea (a professor at the University of Wisconsin) reasserted in his 1924 book The Child: His Nature and His Needs, well-designed programs are needed to put “words” (the findings of research) into practice. Beginning in the 1970s these needed programs, which had existed in the USA for more than 50 years, began a sharp decline. By 2006, at the same time that many research articles were appearing that supported daily physical education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that only about 30% of boys and girls were attending such classes. Books such as educational psychologist Jane Healy’s Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think and What To Do About It (1990) already had cautioned readers about the negative effects of such things as scripted teaching, which would infect the curriculum following the enactment of the well-intended, but poorly conceived, ‘The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001’. Perhaps it is not surprising that recently a growing number of books, articles and Internet postings have been calling for the restitution of quality physical education and community recreational programs. This article investigates these and related matters.

La participation des femmes aux meetings de l’ASSA.

This paper examines how women’s participation in the Allied Social Science Associations annual meetings has changed since the American Economic Association annual meeting was expanded into a joint conference – initially of seven associations, later joined by many other economics and economics-related associations. Particular attention is paid to characterize how this expansion affected women’s participation. Historical perspective is provided by comparing women’s participation in ASSA meetings in the 20th century and first years of the 21st century with their participation in the ‘first’ ASSA, the American Social Science Association, in the decades between the end of the Civil War and the 1885 creation of the American Economic Association.

History and Significance of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA‐II): A Symposium

BY MANY COUNTS, the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA), held each year in January in one of the larger cities in the United States, is the most important conference in the world for economists. It draws the largest number of economists at any meeting, it has come to be crucial for the global labor market for economists, and it is where the most broadly based, if not the most profound, substantial discussions on economic topics are to be had. The luminaries of the discipline are hailed there, and as scholars, publishers, colleagues, and friends gather, relations are built, maintained, and, possibly, break down. Many a project starts, culminates, or is salvaged at these meetings. Beginning in the 1930s, formally it has remained somewhat amorphous, as Coats (1985: 1718) has put it, without constitution and bylaws, run mostly by the American Economic Association (AEA). The associations that have gathered underneath the umbrella that ASSA provides have changed substantially over the years, which lends credit to the belief that the lack of formal status may have given it a degree of flexibility that might not have been possible otherwise. Jane Clary in her contribution to this symposium makes the point that this flexibility allows, at least to some extent, the inclusion in the meetings of many different points of view regarding economic theory and policy. Although relations between the representatives of the different associations are largely collegial, they have, at times, also been strenuous. It is interesting to see how an earlier ASSA--the American Social Science Association, ASSA-I, in existence between 1865 and 1909 (Dimand 2000; Haskell 1977)--has seen a plethora of disciplines come into being in the United States: sociology (ASA), history (AHA), political science (APSA), and statistitics (ASS), as well as economics (AEA) (see also Ross 1991). Academic economics has it roots in the earlier ASSA, and economics, as a discipline, came into its own in the late period of this first ASSA, as shown in Barber (1993). The topic of this symposium, ASSA(II), evolved around AEA in the late 1930s as the distinct associations began to have meetings particular to their disciplines. Developments such as these, as Michael Bernstein argues in his contribution to this symposium, as well as in his 2004 book, may be seen as attempts to professionalize the discipline, as much as Haskell (1977) and Furner (1975) have argued for earlier periods of time. Much of the success economists have had at this is in no small part due to the institution of the ASSA(II) (see Backhouse 2008). John Siegfried, executive secretary of AEA, in his piece gives some intriguing insights into the workings of this organization. The transparency with which he does so is remarkable and should give critics of the way ASSA(II) is organized cause to think. As the economy globalizes, the economics profession does also. Cooperation between individuals and organizations the world across grows (Goyal et al. 2006), and so the importance of meeting occasionally at a single location once in a while to touch base grows. ASSA has evolved into the focal point, and declining transportation costs have helped people come from afar to the United States for these meetings. A piece of wisdom that Marshall ([1890] 1982: X, IV, [section]4) has offered thus comes true: Every cheapening of the means of communication, every new facility for the free interchange of ideas between distant places alters the action of the forces which tend to localize industries . …

The Evolution of the Allied Social Science Associations

AbstractThe organization of the meetings of the approximately 50 economics associations of the Allied Social Science Associations has evolved over the past 140 years, beginning with meetings of the American Social Science Association in 1865, which included social scientists from political science, history, sociology, and economics. Out of this association, the separate disciplines formed their own organizations beginning in the 1880s. Though several of these associations continued to meet together until the 1930s, each discipline gradually separated its meetings from those of the others. During the 1940s, however, other newly formed economics associations began meeting at the same time and place as the AEA, and the Allied Social Science Associations evolved out of these meetings. Though the name of the organization includes “social science,” the associations meeting together are predominately, if not completely, economics associations. These associations, however, profess many different approaches to the study of economics. This paper traces the evolution of these meetings and attempts to come to some conclusions concerning the significance of this association, the most important of which is the role of the ASSA in providing a broad and tolerant platform and a vehicle through which different points of view toward economic theory and policy can be discussed.

New and improved educationalising: faster, more powerful and longer lasting

This paper is a historical and critical analysis of changes in features of educationalisation focusing on how educationalisation has been characterised over time by a peculiar interweaving of knowledge and social reform. The history of the American Social Science Association provides a backdrop; drawing on the theories of Deleuze, this paper highlights historical differences between previous and current educationalisation features in research and schooling. Building on the Deleuzian analysis, the paper then examines characteristics of Problem-based Learning, as an example of educationalisation, in so far as it casts education as an engineering task. The paper concludes with a critical analysis of norm-referenced standards in educational research and schooling, questioning the relationship between education and empowerment.

13 Harris and His Anachronistic Attack

William Torrey Harris (1835-1909) is best known as an American educator, editor, and philosopher. He served as a teacher in, and superintendent of, St. Louis, Missouri, school system, and later as U.S. Commissioner of Education. He edited Appleton's International Education Series, Webster's New International Dictionary, and philosophy section of Johnson's Encyclopedia; he wrote numerous reports, papers and articles, and books. He was (with Emerson and Alcott) a founder of influential School of Philosophy in Concord, Massachusetts, founder and editor of Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and a promoter of Hegelian idealism. Yet, on several occasions, Harris took time from these activities to offer his critique of George's Progress and Poverty. (None of George's other works were discussed.) Harris believed that his basic arguments against George's ideas were never refuted. (1) Attack on Deductive Method It is not surprising that Harris emerged as a critic of George since, on matters of economic theory, Harris was a disciple of Henry C. Carey. (2) Carey was a critic of deductive method of analysis and Ricardian rent theory in particular. Further, his theory of income distribution was quite different from theories of classicists and George. (3) Carey's ideas provided foundation for Harris's critique. Harris's attack began in September 1886 in an address to Saratoga meeting of American Social Science Association. (4) The speech was important for several reasons. First, it pattern for all of his other attacks. Since Harris believed that his arguments were devastating and that they had not been refuted, he did little to revise them. Second, as Barker noted in his definitive biography of George, with this speech Harris became the most famous person to speak against [George] in this period. (5) After some preliminary remarks, Harris, following Carey, attacked all of classical economists, including George, for their use of deductive method of reasoning. Carey claimed that axioms of classicists (wealth-maximizing behavior, drives to reproduce, etc.) simply did not adequately represent actual human behavior. He also claimed that when classicists applied deductive logic to these inadequate axioms they inevitably got inadequate results. Further, he charged that classicists never detected flaws because their test of their theories' validity was logical consistency, not ability to explain and predict real world behavior. He maintained that if classicists ever tested their theories against actual data, they would have had to reject most of their theories. (6) Harris, in similar fashion, said that classicists failed because they set up principles for absolute ones which serve only for a nation of mere shopkeepers. (7) He too believed that empirical tests would lead to rejection of most of classical political economy. Carey felt that one of worst errors produced by classicists was Ricardian rent theory, a theory that postulated that most fertile land would be settled first and that margin of cultivation would then extend downward and outward as more land was needed. Carey said that historical evidence of England, home of most of classicists, revealed that reverse was true, namely, that first settlements were in hill country and that settlement extended to, not from, richer soil of river bottoms. (8) That pattern, insisted Carey, was quite general. Harris, in turn, argued that Ricardian view was obviously incorrect because, if best land had been settled first, lush Amazon basin would have been settled before most other parts of world. (9) In reiterating Carey's arguments, Harris apparently never realized that leading economists had refuted them twenty years before. John Stuart Mill reasoned that in areas of new settlement, in which labor and capital were scarce relative to land, people might not settle on land that would eventually prove to be most fertile if initial cultivation of that land required more capital and labor than cultivation of another plot that would eventually prove less fertile. …

Nineteenth-Century American Feminist Economics: From Caroline Dall to Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's (1898) and Economics stands as a landmark in the feminist economic analysis of gender relations and increasingly is also recognized as a pioneering work of American institutionalist economics (see Mary Ann Dimand, 1995). Because it stands out so strongly as a major contribution, and Economics has been perceived as an isolated work, apart from links to Lester Ward's sociology and parallels with the contemporary writings of Thorstein Veblen. This paper, however, views and Economics as the culmination of four decades of American feminist economic thought, beginning with Caroline Dall and Virginia Penny, and draws attention to Gilman's connection with that tradition through Helen Campbell. This tradition is so little known that the names of these four women do not even appear in Dorothy Ross's (1991) excellent Origins of American Social Science, even though Dall founded the American Social Science Association (ASSA), referred to by Ross (1991 p. 63) as the mother of associations, including the American Economic Association, and even though Campbell won a prize from the American Economic Association for Wage-Earners (Campbell, 1893), which was published with an introduction by Richard T. Ely. Caroline Wells Healey Dall (1822-1912) first became interested in feminism in 1837-1838 as a result of Harriet Martineau's (1837) chapter on The Political Non-existence of Women in the United States and an address on women's rights given at the Boston Lyceum by Amasa Walker, an underground railway activist soon to become professor of political economy at Oberlin. In 1841, Dall (then Caroline Healey) attended a series of ten weekly conversations led by the feminist author Margaret Fuller, publishing her notes of these conversations more than half a century later. While teaching school in Georgetown in the early 1840's before her marriage, she undertook the first census of free blacks in the District of Columbia, in order to organize schools for them, and in the early 1850s, while living in Toronto (where her husband was a Unitarian minister), she acted as Canadian agent for a society aiding fugitive slaves. Dall remained in her native Boston with her two children when her husband sailed to India as a missionary (where he stayed for the remaining 30 years of his life). She reported to a women's rights convention in Boston in 1855 on the legal status of women, following with a series of annual reports on that status, and with organization of the New England Rights Convention in Boston in 1859. A precursor of Charlotte Perkins Gilman among American feminists, Dall went beyond the suffrage question and unequal laws on property rights to a critique of the economic role of women in a series of three public lectures in Boston in November 1859, published as Woman's Right to Labor; or Low Wages and Hard Work (1860). Together with two series of lectures on women's right to education and rights under the law, this series was incorporated in Dall's major work, College, the Market, and the Courts; or Women's Relation to Education, Labor, and the Law (1867). Dall (1867 [1972 p. 179]) attributed women' s discontent to restricted opportunities for paid employment, for it was no longer the case that every woman found, in spinning, weaving, and sewing in the active life of a ... household, full employment for time and thought. In moving from a survey of women's unequal legal status to a critique of women' s repressed economic role, Dall followed the same path as the British activist Barbara Bodichon (whose 1859 pamphlet, and Work, appeared in a revised American edition in 1959) and, later, Jeanne Chauvin (1892) in France. * Department of Economics, Brock University, St. Ca tharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada (e-mail: dimandCc adam.econ.brocku.ca).

Epidemiology and social sciences: towards a critical reengagement in the 21st century.

ly, mathematicians newly plumb laws of probability, elucidating links between seemingly disparate games of decisions of juries, and errors in celestial observations (9, 18-23). What Hacking has termed era of avalanche of numbers, taming of chance, and erosion of determinism is begun (21-23). New times call for new concepts, and in this context of social upheaval and redefinition of contours of state and society, French writers create la science sociale (7, 24, 25). Offering promise of systematic and increasingly quantitative knowledge of society, term first bursts into public view in a French revolutionary pamphlet in 1789, is adopted by influential mathematician-turned-political philosopher, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), and enters British and American English through translation of texts by Condorcet and his colleagues (24, 25). Epidemiology, too, comes into its own, by name (26). The term is coined, and gains currency, in 1802, when Don Joaquin Villalba publishes Epidemiologia Espanola, a chronicle of epidemics in Spain (27). It quickly encompasses era's new quantitative investigations of mounting outbreaks of deadly diseases, both old (e.g., typhus) and new (e.g., cholera and yellow fever). These epidemics bum through fast-growing and increasingly congested cities, home to commercial ports and to squalid neighborhoods barely housing multitudes of laborers employed in (or unemployed by) new factories of Industrial Revolution (28, 29). Only, in this period, I would argue that distinctions between epidemiology and social sciences are imposed chiefly by hindsight. More germane is thennew and common cause: the application of numerical method to living beings in all their social relations (30, p. 39), as defined in 1839 by one of era's prolific investigators, William Guy (1810-1885), an early member of both London Statistical Society (founded in 1834) and London Epidemiological Society (founded in 1850). Employing umbrella term the science of statistics, Guy explains: Man (sic), considered as a social being, is its object; mean duration of his life, and probable period of his death; circumstances which preserve or destroy health of his body, or affect culture of his mind; wealth which he amasses, crimes which he commits, and punishments which he incurs—all these are weighed, compared, and calculated; and nothing which can affect welfare of society of which he is a member, or glory and prosperity of country to which he belongs, is excluded from its grand and comprehensive survey (30, p. 35). A quarter of a century later, in 1865, a similar breadth of concerns appears in founding statement of American Social Science Association (31). Under this umbrella, influential researchers from Louis Rene Villerme (1782-1863) in France (32) to William Farr (1807-1883) in England (33) to Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) in Germany (34) to Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874), Belgian astronomer-turnedEpidemiol Rev Vol. 22, No. 1, 2000

Exceptionalism and Internationalism: The Origins of American Social Science Reconsidered

This paper examines the international context in which American social science was institutionalized in the generation after the Civil War, following the foundation of the American Social Science Association in 1865. The ASSA was modelled on an influential British forum, founded eight years previously, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. A comparison of these two organisations from the 1860s to the 1880s allows consideration of British intellectual and political influences on the first American social scientists. It also helps in the identification of the social and political attitudes of the well‐born, cosmopolitan, and high‐minded American reformers attracted to social science at this time. The theme of American exceptionalism has recently been emphasized when considering the motives and intentions of early social science in the United States. It is argued here that the replication in America of models of the new discipline which were first developed in Britain, is indicative also of a self‐conscious internationalism among the American social‐scientific community of this period. In addition to an institutional comparison, the article examines the careers and ideas of several representative figures in this process of Anglo‐American liberal transference, among them the physician Dr. Edward Jarvis, the feminist Caroline Healey Dall, the jurist David Dudley Field, and the famed British interpreter of American experience, James Bryce.

Some Antecedents of Educational Philosophy in Britain with Particular Reference to Social Science

Summary It would be convenient to pretend that the histories of educational philosophy in Britain and, by extension, the USA and Australia, were responses to a common social and intellectual history but convenience in this case could only be accomplished at the expense of explanatory power. The history of educational philosophy in these three places is parallel but not in common. Philosophy of education in Britain is more closely related to philosophy than is philosophy of education in the USA. Philosophy of education in the USA appropriated the lead of the American Social Science Association and initially retained closer connections with social science than did its English counterpart. Nevertheless, it is argued here that educational philosophy's reference to social science—Victorian and modern—is the missing explanatory element in modem histories of the discipline. The appropriation of education by social science—a common feature of the intellectual history of education in Britain, Australasia, and the ...

The ideology of the American urban parks and recreation movement: Past and future

Abstract The American parks and recreation movement has its roots within the 19th century reform era, during which upper‐class, educated men and women saw it as their aristocratic duty to raise the masses to the level of middle class standards. The transition from a reform movement to a profession is cast as an inevitability for the movement, just as it was for other American social science movements. Professionalization of the movement is traced through the evolution of the American Social Science Association. The ideologies that fueled both the reform movement and the professionally led movement reveal these two movements as disparate; yet both serve to preserve a class society. Professionalism is inherently transcendent of class, if championed by anarchistic professionals in the pursuit of truth; therefore, professionalism is an adversary of class‐creating forces: bureaucracy, hierarchy, domination, commercialism, and centralization.

The evolving relationship of history and sociology

Allow me, a historian, to say that the notion of social science is relatively recent. The reason for this is the relatively late appearance of the notion, indeed, of the word "scientist," which appears in En? glish only around 1850. Of course a philosophical and analytical interest in human society existed from the beginning of history. Aris? totle wrote that human society was, by its nature, different from all other groupings, wherefore its analysis and study called for a different kind of realism. Nearly two thousand years later the renaissance humanists rediscovered and restated the uniqueness of human rela? tionships. Montaigne had the ancient Latin phrase, homo sum: nihil humanum a me alienum puto, carved on the beam above the door of his study in his little tower. Another one hundred and forty years later, Vico, in Naples, suggested that the study of human society required an approach, method, and philosophy different from the study of nature. Yet the 18th century turned out to be marked not by the influence of Vico but of Voltaire. The philosophers of the Enlightenment be? lieved?and their legacy is predominant even now?that due to the tremendous advances of Reason and Science, the time had come to apply their positive techniques to the study and improvement of human society. Man is A Machine, wrote De La Mettrie in 1749, a "radical" and "new" statement at the time, but one whose antiquated, corroded and incomplete character should be more than evident two hundred years later. Yet, mutatis mutandis, most people (especially including our biologists and technicians) believe this even now. On that belief hangs the tremendous and somber tale of the decay of independent thinking and the decline of the entire Modern Age. In any event, in the 20th century, unlike in the 18th, the notion of "social science" kept a few humanists irritated. In 1912, for example, Agnes Repplier, a fine American essayist, wrote in a letter to Harrison Morris: "You know everything and everybody. Please tell me what is the American Social Science Association, of which I have been asked to become a member. It has dues and gives medals. Shall I accept?" She added a postscript: "I see by looking again at the card, the name of the thing is the National Institute of Social Sciences. What are social sciences?"

Social Class in North American Urban History

Social class analysis is an old tradition in American social science. Late nineteenth-century American social commentary routinely assumed that two great classes, Capital and Labor, dominated American society. Not only academics, social critics, or spokesmen of the labor movement, but also representatives of business interests and government shared this perception. Indeed, the development of a permanent working class, according to Furner, preoccupied many of the earliest professional social scientists, the founders of the American Social Science Association.1

Professionalism, Authority and the Transformation of American Thought

Thomas L. Haskell. The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Authority. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. 276 + xii pp. Bruce Kuklick. The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge Massachusetts 1860-1930. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977. 674 + xxvii pp. These books continue, and carry to a higher level, the discussion of "professionalism" which has been so prominent a feature of American social history in the last decade or so. However valuable their contribution to that enterprise, though, they are both rich in a number of other themes, and make notable contributions to our understanding of that decisive change in the American mind which occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth.

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. Thomas L. Haskell

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. Thomas L. Haskell Patricia WoolfPatricia Woolf Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 71, Number 2Jun., 1980 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/352498 Views: 1Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1980 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: John Neu One Hundred Sixth Critical Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (to January 1981), Isis 72, no.55 (Oct 2015): 5–248.https://doi.org/10.1086/352904

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority.Thomas L. Haskell

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. Thomas L. Haskell Mary O. FurnerMary O. Furner Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 85, Number 5Mar., 1980 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/227155 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1980 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. By Thomas L. Haskell. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Pp. xii + 276. $12.00.)

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. By Thomas L. Haskell. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Pp. xii + 276. $12.00.)

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. By Thomas L. Haskell. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. ix + 276 pp. $12.00)

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. By Thomas L. Haskell. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. ix + 276 pp. $12.00)

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority

The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority