The first university department of sociology,
founded in Chicago 1892, under Albion Small.
He was succeeded by Robert E Park, who with W
I Thomas, Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth, and R
McKenzie created a centre for the social
sciences in the 1920s and 1930s, studying
urban life, including crime and deviance in
Chicago, with its variety of urban
communities, lifestyles, and ethnic
subcultures. A neo-Chicagoan school emerged
in the 1940s under Erving Goffman and Howard
Becker.