Revisiting regional traditions: An emerging sociology of the great plains

Abstract

Meliorism, empiricism, ethnography, locality, and reform characterized Midwestern American Sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. Almost a century later, the mini-regional Great Plains Sociological Association, through its refereed publication, The Great Plains Sociologist (TGPS), maintains a variant of this tradition. We examine the first decade (1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997) of published articles (N=52) in TGPS with a focus on authorship, affiliations, editorship, and components of the earliest Chicago sociology and its diffusion to the University of North Dakota and the region through the work of John Morris Gillette. The results show that TGPS is uniquely a publication representing empirical studies, of homespun social issues, involving local samples, by sociologists and criminologists affiliated with a range of colleges and universities in and around the Dakotas and that a sociology of the Great Plains is emerging. Implications for the journal, state and mini-regional associations, and the discipline are discussed.American sociology departments and courses are rooted in the Midwest (Ritzer, 1988). One such department is located at the University of North Dakota (UND) whose first president, Webster Merrifield, a student of William Graham Sumner at Yale, taught the first sociology course in 1885 (Dawes, 1983). Merrifield recruited and hired John Morris Gillette, who in 1908 established the Department of Sociology at the University of North Dakota---one of the first departments of sociology in the United States. Gillette had studied under Albion Small, a social reformer and meliorist who had established both the first graduate program in sociology in the world at the University