"Yankee City" Revisited: The Perils of Historical Naivete

Centering Small Cities for Urban Sociology in the 21st Century

“…Yankee City's size gave Warner the chance to explore these issues by studying a community as a whole. Heavily empirical, Warner's in‐depth taxonomies were criticized at the time (see Opler 1942; Pfautz and Duncan 1950; Thernstrom 1965), but his methodological choice to examine phenomena across a range of institutions has been praised as influential (Baba 2009).…”

Settler agnosia in the field: Indigenous action, functional ignorance, and the origins of ethnographic entrapment

“…Family issues forced Commons to suspend her work in 1933, and it was left incomplete when she died in 1935 (McMillan , 232–33n11). That same year, Srole (1908–93) came to Chicago from Harvard University with his adviser, W. Lloyd Warner, for whom he had worked in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on the Yankee City project, the “most intensive, exhaustive, and expensive survey ever made of a small American city” (Thernstrom , 236). While waiting to defend his dissertation, which would later be published as The Social System of American Ethnic Groups (Warner and Srole ), the third of five in the Yankee City series, Srole was funded to continue Commons's Ho‐Chunk research under the supervision of instructor Fred Eggan and department chair Faye Cooper‐Cole.…”

Community impacts on organizational interaction

“…While communities tend to be identified by external entities in terms of such society-wide referents as racial composition, economic measures, and income (Suttles, 1972;Timms, 1971), there are additionally a number of identificational sources which are unique to the community itself. Among these are the community's relation to its inanimate environment (Rickson and Simkins, 1972), its history (Aiken and Mott, 1970;Thernstrorn, 1970), its traditions (Thernstrom, 1970;Lowry, 1968), its economic structures (Logan, 1976;Miernyk, 1965), its political structures (Coleman, 1957), and its policies toward growth and development (Logan, 1976).…”