Albion Woodbury Small

Albion Woodbury Small 1854-1926, American sociologist, b. Buckfield, Maine, grad. Colby College, 1876, and further educated in Germany. He was made president of Colby in 1889, but left it in 1892 to found at the Univ. of Chicago the first department of sociology in an American university. Small also established (1895) and edited the American Journal of Sociology, the first such journal in the United States. He did much to establish sociology as a valid field for academic study, and he occupied a leading place as a historian of sociological thought. General Sociology (1905) is the chief of his several works.

Small, Albion W. (1854–1926) An American sociologist, less known for his substantive contributions to sociology than for his role in establishing (in 1892) the prototypical and for many years the leading sociology department, at the University of Chicago. Founder of, and prolific contributor to, the American Journal of Sociology (1895)
, his publications include General Sociology (1907), Adam Smith and Modern Sociology (1907), and The Meaning of the Social Sciences (1910).