Race, Class, and Socialization: Allison Davis and Twentieth-century American Social Thought (2015)
Varel, David Alan (Author)
Pittenger, Mark A. (Advisor)
University of Colorado at Boulder
Pittenger, Mark A.
This project is an intellectual biography of the African-American social scientist Allison Davis (1902-1983). It uses his career and thought to investigate the history of twentieth-century American social thought, the history of social science, and African-American history. In particular, it shows how Davis's lived experiences with race and class, as well as his first-rate formal education, made him a pioneering anthropologist and educator. After contributing to the New Negro Renaissance, Davis entered social science and published two classics, Deep South (1941) and Children of Bondage (1940). Both were theoretically and methodologically innovative, and both furthered the larger environmental revolution within social science that made clear the socially-constructed nature of human difference, and hence helped to displace essentialist views. His growing stature within the social-science community prompted the University of Chicago to hire him in 1942. This landmark appointment helped to racially integrate the faculties of other predominantly-white universities, and it made Davis an early civil rights pioneer. As a professor of education at Chicago, Davis had his largest social impact. He investigated the cultural differences between social classes, thus reconciling cultural and structural theories. His work pushed school districts across the country to abolish their use of culturally-biased intelligence tests, and it laid the intellectual foundations for the federal Head Start program. Understanding education as an instrument of democracy, Davis fought for far-reaching educational reforms, including the abolition of racial segregation. Among other achievements, his work here contributed to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Gabriel N. Mendes;
(2015)
Under the Strain of Color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry
(/isis/citation/CBB251110528/)
Article
Brian K. Williams;
(2014)
The African-American Personality: Early Conceptions
(/isis/citation/CBB920367459/)
Book
Martin Summers;
(2019)
Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital
(/isis/citation/CBB685131174/)
Book
Blair Murphy Kelley;
(2010)
Right to ride: Streetcar boycotts and African American citizenship in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson
(/isis/citation/CBB252860857/)
Book
Phoebe Ann Pollitt;
(2016)
African American and Cherokee Nurses in Appalachia: A History, 1900-1965
(/isis/citation/CBB208191630/)
Book
Farber, Paul Lawrence;
(2011)
Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas
(/isis/citation/CBB001033410/)
Book
Smith, Kimberly K.;
(2007)
African American Environmental Thought: Foundations
(/isis/citation/CBB000930104/)
Book
Anthony Ryan Hatch;
(2016)
Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America
(/isis/citation/CBB245142743/)
Book
Richard M., Jr. Mizelle;
(2014)
Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB971840782/)
Chapter
Lewis, Earl;
(2000)
Constructing African Americans as Minorities
(/isis/citation/CBB000102245/)
Book
Slaton, Amy E.;
(2010)
Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line
(/isis/citation/CBB001035093/)
Article
Carmen V. Harris;
(2019)
The South Carolina Home in Black and White: Race, Gender, and Power in Home Demonstration Work
(/isis/citation/CBB904806755/)
Book
Wailoo, Keith;
(2011)
How Cancer Crossed the Color Line
(/isis/citation/CBB001231902/)
Book
Holloway, Karla F. C.;
(2011)
Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics
(/isis/citation/CBB001200198/)
Article
Watkins, Rachel J.;
(2013)
Biohistorical Narratives of Racial Difference in the American Negro: Notes toward a Nuanced History of American Physical Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB001212637/)
Book
Carolyn Finney;
(2014)
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
(/isis/citation/CBB468417469/)
Thesis
Jeffrey Aaron Snyder;
(2011)
Race, Nation and Education: Black History During Jim Crow
(/isis/citation/CBB691998127/)
Article
Vanessa Burrows;
Barbara Berney;
(2019)
Creating Equal Health Opportunity: How the Medical Civil Rights Movement and the Johnson Administration Desegregated U.S. Hospitals
(/isis/citation/CBB415344179/)
Article
Olivia Marcucci;
(2017)
Zora Neale Hurston and the Brown Debate: Race, Class, and the Progressive Empire
(/isis/citation/CBB076521156/)
Book
William E. O'Brien;
(2015)
Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South
(/isis/citation/CBB517292798/)
Be the first to comment!