Introduction to Sociology

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917)

Durkheim helped legitimize and define sociology as a formal academic discipline by establishing the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895 and by publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method (1895). In another important work, Division of Labour in Society (1893), Durkheim articulated his theory of how societies transform from a primitive state into a capitalist, industrial society. According to Durkheim, people rise to their proper levels in society based on merit.
Durkheim believed that sociologists could study objective “social facts.” He also believed that through such studies it would be possible to determine if a society was “healthy” or “pathological.” He saw healthy societies as stable, while pathological societies experienced a breakdown in social norms between individuals and society.
In 1897, Durkheim attempted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his rules of social research when he published a work titled Suicide. Durkheim examined suicide statistics in different police districts to research differences between Catholic and Protestant communities. He attributed the differences to socioreligious forces rather than to individual or psychological causes.

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4. 
   What two historical events most influenced Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim?
   
   1. 
      French Revolution and Industrial Revolution
      
   2. 
      Civil War and Reconstruction
      
   3. 
      Revolutionary War and the War of 1812
      
   4. 
      French and Indian Wars and the Industrial Revolution
      

Check your answers at the end of this document

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)

Figure 4. Ida B. Wells was a revolutionary teacher and journalist who brought many sociological issues to light, particularly racial and gender inequalities.

Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in Mississippi to parents were freed after the Civil War and who went on to be politically active during Reconstruction (1865-1877). Wells’ parents and younger brother died during a yellow fever epidemic in 1878 when she was just 16 years old. She became a teacher in a black elementary school (Wells attended some college prior to her parents’ deaths) so that her five other siblings would not be separated and sent to foster homes^[1]. She relocated from Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee to earn higher wages, and to pursue further education. 

In 1884, when Wells was just 24 years old, she refused to give up her seat in a first-class ladies train car and was subsequently dragged from the car by the conductor and two men. After being criminally charged, Wells fought the case all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court, based on the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations. Although Wells lost after the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision, her passion for equality and social justice only became stronger and more influential. (Her direct action would be echoed by Rosa Parks’ civil disobedience 71 years later.) In 1891, she was fired from her teaching job for criticizing the quality of blacks-only schools in Memphis and thus began a new career in journalism, starting at the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper, which she later co-owned.
After the lynching of three of her friends in 1892, Wells became one of the nation’s most vocal anti-lynching activists. She launched an extensive investigation of lynching and published her findings in a pamphlet titled “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases,” in 1892^[2]. Wells exposed lynching as a barbaric practice of whites in the South used to intimidate and oppress African Americans who represented economic and political competition—and a subsequent threat to entrenched, hierarchical power—for whites. A white mob eventually destroyed her newspaper office and presses, though this did not stifle her voice or prevent her investigative reporting from finding a national audience, particularly through a distribution network of black-owned newspapers.
Wells was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1908, but her name was left off the list of founding members. She also worked to have full inclusion for black women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and participated in the 1913 Suffrage March in front of the White House. Although not formally trained as an academic sociologist, Wells was the epitome of a public sociologist because she examined racial and gender inequalities and made them public issues. In Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases she stated, “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press” (1892). This forward-thinking statement is one of her many legacies in sociology.