Biography robert park

works by park

supplementary bibliography

Robert Ezra Park (), American sociologist, was a leading figure in the notable University of Chicago “school of sociology.” He was born in Harveyville, Pennsylvania, but soon thereafter his family moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, and Park grew up in what Hamlin Garland called the “Middle Border,” where there was still much unsettled land and where towns were new and few.

He left home after graduating from the local high school, and after a year at the University of Minnesota entered the University of Michigan, from which he received a bachelor of philosophy degree in John Dewey, his chief instructor at Michigan, intervened decisively in Park’s intellectual life by introducing him to Franklin Ford, a man with an original cast of mind.

Ford and Park planned a new kind of newspaper, to be called The Thought News, which would register movements of public opinion in some exact manner, just as the market price in the stock market