Sociology 2155: Worksheet--"The First Measured Century," part I

1. What did Frederick Jackson Turner see as the significance of the frontier in American history and why was that changing by the time of the 1890 census?

2. Who were the immigrants arriving in the United States between 1880 and 1920, and where did they tend to settle?

3. What were some of the scientific techniques that were viewed as establishing a scientific basis for racism in this period?

4. Who commissioned the Hull House Maps and Papers and what did they show?

5. What was eugenics?

Sociology 2001: Groups--"The First Measured Century," part I

1. Why do you think the immigrants who were arriving in large numbers in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century came to be regarded so negatively by those who were already here? Specifically what were the complaints about these immigrants?

2. There were social scientists who supported so-called scientific racism, but there were also social scientists, including Franz Boas and Jane Addams, who were opposed to this theory. What was the basis for their opposition?

3. What about the use of the new IQ testing on World War I soldiers? As you will remember, it showed an extremely high rate of "feeble-minded" among the "new" immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe? Doesn't this discredit the scientific approach to measurement of intelligence? Why or why not?

4. The Children's Bureau, created by Congress in 1912, was headed by Julia Lathrop (one of the residents of Hull House in Chicago and the first woman head of a federal agency); one of its missions was the collection of statistics on births and deaths. Why are these sorts of statistics so important to social science?