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Psychology is defined as "the scientific study of behavior and mental processes". Philosophical interest in the human mind and behavior dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Persia, Greece, China, and India.
Psychology as a field of experimental study began in 1854 in the German city of Leipzig, when Gustav Fechner created the first theory of how judgments about sensory experiences are made and how to experiment on them. Fechner's theory, recognized today as Signal Detection Theory, foreshadowed the development of statistical theories of comparative judgment and thousands of experiments based on his ideas (Link, S. W. Psychological Science, 1995). In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt was also the first person to refer to himself as a psychologist. A notable precursor to Wundt was Ferdinand Ueberwasser (17521812), who designated himself Professor of Empirical Psychology and Logic in 1783 and gave lectures on empirical psychology at the Old University of Münster, Germany. Other important early contributors to the field include Hermann Ebbinghaus (a pioneer in the study of memory), William James (the American father of pragmatism), and Ivan Pavlov (who developed the procedures associated with classical conditioning).
Soon after the development of experimental psychology, various kinds of applied psychology appeared. G. Stanley Hall brought scientific pedagogy to the United States from Germany in the early 1880s. John Dewey's educational theory of the 1890s was another example. Also in the 1890s, Hugo Münsterberg began writing about the application of psychology to industry, law, and other fields. Lightner Witmer established the first psychological clinic in the 1890s. James McKeen Cattell adapted Francis Galton's anthropometric methods to generate the first program of mental testing in the 1890s. In Vienna, meanwhile, Sigmund Freud independently developed an approach to the study of the mind called psychoanalysis, which became a highly influential theory in psychology.
The 20th century saw a reaction to Edward Titchener's critique of Wundt's empiricism. This contributed to the formulation of behaviorism by John B. Watson, which was popularized by B. F. Skinner through operant conditioning. Behaviorism proposed emphasizing the study of overt behavior, because it could be quantified and easily measured. Early behaviorists considered the study of the mind too vague for productive scientific study. However, Skinner and his colleagues did study thinking as a form of covert behavior to which they could apply the same principles as overt behavior.
The final decades of the 20th century saw the rise of cognitive science, an interdisciplinary approach to studying the human mind. Cognitive science again considers the mind as a subject for investigation, using the tools of cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, behaviorism, and neurobiology. This form of investigation has proposed that a wide understanding of the human mind is possible, and that such an understanding may be applied to other research domains, such as artificial intelligence.
There are conceptual divisions of psychology in "forces" or "waves", based on its schools and historical trends. This terminology was popularized among the psychologists to differentiate a growing humanism in therapeutic practice from the 1930s onwards, called the "third force", in response to the deterministic tendencies of Watson's behaviourism and Freud's psychoanalysis. Proponents of Humanistic psychology included Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Gordon Allport, Erich Fromm, and Rollo May. Their humanistic concepts are also related to existential psychology, Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, positive psychology (which has Martin Seligman as one of the leading proponents), C. R. Cloninger's approach to well-being and character development, as well as to transpersonal psychology, incorporating such concepts as spirituality, self-transcendence, self-realization, self-actualization, and mindfulness. In cognitive behavioral psychotherapy, similar terms have also been incorporated, by which "first wave" is considered the initial behavioral therapy; a "second wave", Albert Ellis's cognitive therapy; and a "third wave", with the acceptance and commitment therapy, which emphasizes one's pursuit of values, methods of self-awareness, acceptance and psychological flexibility, instead of challenging negative thought schemes. A "fourth wave" would be the one that incorporates transpersonal concepts and positive flourishing, in a way criticized by some researchers for its heterogeneity and theoretical direction dependent on the therapist's view. A "fifth wave" has now been proposed by a group of researchers seeking to integrate earlier concepts into a unifying theory.
== Early psychological thought ==

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Many cultures throughout history have speculated on the nature of the mind, heart, soul, spirit, brain, etc. For instance, in Ancient Egypt, the Edwin Smith Papyrus contains an early description of the brain, and some speculations on its functions (described in a medical/surgical context) and the descriptions could be related to Imhotep who was the first Egyptian physician who anatomized and discovered the body of the human being. Though other medical documents of ancient times were full of incantations and applications meant to turn away disease-causing demons and other superstition, the Edwin Smith Papyrus gives remedies to almost 50 conditions and only two contain incantations to ward off evil.
Ancient Greek philosophers, from Thales (fl. 550 BC) through even to the Roman period, developed an elaborate theory of what they termed the psuchẽ (psyche) (from which the first half of "psychology" is derived), as well as other "psychological" terms nous, thumos, logistikon, etc. Classical Greece (fifth century BC), philosophers taught "naturalism", the belief that laws of nature shape our world, as opposed to gods and demons determining human fate. Alcmaeon, for example, believed the brain, not the heart, was the "organ of thought. "He tracked the ascending sensory nerves from the body to the brain, theorizing that mental activity originated in the region where the central nervous system is located and that the cause of mental illness resided within the brain. He applied this understanding to classify mental diseases and treatments. One of the most influential Ancient Greek influences on psychology came from the accounts of Plato (especially in the Republic), Pythagoras and of Aristotle (esp. Peri Psyches, also known by its Latin title, De Anima).
Plato's tripartite theory of the soul, Chariot Allegory and concepts such as eros defined the subsequent Western Philosophy views of the psyche and anticipated modern psychological proposals. For example, concepts such as id, ego, super-ego and libido were interpreted by psychoanalysts as having been anticipated by Plato, to the extent that "in 1920, Freud decided to present Plato as the precursor of his own theory, as part of a strategy directed to define the scientific and cultural collocation of psychoanalysis".
Other Hellenistic philosophers, namely the Stoics and Epicurians, diverged from the Classical Greek tradition in several important ways, especially in their concern with questions of the physiological basis of the mind. The Roman physician Galen addressed these issues most elaborately and influentially of all. The Greek tradition influenced some Christian and Islamic thought on the topic.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Manual of Discipline (from the Dead Sea Scrolls, c.21 BC 61 AD) notes the division of human nature into two temperaments or opposing spirits of either veracity or perversity.
Walter M. Freeman proposes that Thomism is the philosophical system explaining cognition that is most compatible with neurodynamics, in a 2008 article in the journal Mind and Matter entitled "Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas".
In Asia, China had a long history of administering tests of ability as part of its education system. Chinese texts from 2500 years ago mention neuropsychiatric illness, including descriptions of mania and psychosis with or without epilepsy. "Imbalance" was the mechanism of psychosis. Other conditions described include confusion, visual illusions, intoxication, stress, and even malingering. Psychological theories about stages of human development can be traced to the time of Confucius, about 2500 years ago.
In the 6th century AD, Lin Xie carried out an early experiment, in which he asked people to draw a square with one hand and at the same time draw a circle with the other (ostensibly to test people's vulnerability to distraction). It has been cited that this was the first psychology experiment.
India had a theory of "the self" in its Vedanta philosophical writings. Additionally, Indians thought about the individual's self as being enclosed by different levels known as koshas. Additionally, the Sankya philosophy said that the mind has five components, including manas (lower mind), ahankara (sense of I-ness), chitta (memory bank of mind), buddhi (intellect), and atman (self/soul). Patanjali was one of the founders of the yoga tradition, sometime between 200 and 400 BC (pre-dating Buddhist psychology) and a student of the Vedas. He developed the science of breath and mind and wrote his knowledge in the form of between 194 and 196 aphorisms called the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. He developed modern Yoga for psychological resilience and balance. He is reputed to have used yoga therapeutically for anxiety, depression and mental disorders as common then as now. Buddhist philosophies have developed several psychological theories (see Buddhism and psychology), formulating interpretations of the mind and concepts such as aggregates (skandhas), emptiness (sunyata), non-self (anatta), mindfulness and Buddha-nature, which are addressed today by theorists of humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Several Buddhist lineages have developed notions analogous to those of modern Western psychology, such as the unconscious, personal development and character improvement, the latter being part of the Noble Eightfold Path and expressed, for example, in the Tathagatagarbha Sutra. Hinayana traditions, such as the Theravada, focus more on individual meditation, while Mahayana traditions also emphasize the attainment of a Buddha nature of wisdom (prajña) and compassion (karuṇā) in the realization of the boddhisattva ideal, but affirming it more metaphysically, in which charity and helping sentient beings is cosmically fundamental. Buddhist monk and scholar D. T. Suzuki describes the importance of the individual's inner enlightenment and the self-realization of the mind. Researcher David Germano, in his thesis on Longchenpa, also shows the importance of self-actualization in the dzogchen teaching lineage.
Medieval Muslim physicians also developed practices to treat patients with a variety of "diseases of the mind".
Ahmed ibn Sahl al-Balkhi (850934) was among the first, in this tradition, to discuss disorders related to both the body and the mind. Al-Balkhi recognized that the body and the soul can be healthy or sick, or "balanced or imbalanced". He wrote that imbalance of the body can result in fever, headaches and other bodily illnesses, while imbalance of the soul can result in anger, anxiety, sadness and other nafs-related symptoms.
Avicenna, similarly, did early work in the treatment of nafs-related illnesses, and developed a system for associating changes in the mind with inner feelings. Avicenna also described phenomena we now recognize as neuropsychiatric conditions, including hallucination, mania, nightmare, melancholia, dementia, epilepsy and tremor.
Ancient and medieval thinkers who discussed issues related to psychology included:

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== Early British ==
Although the British had the first scholarly journal dedicated to the topic of psychology Mind, founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain and edited by George Croom Robertson it was quite a long while before experimental psychology developed there to challenge the strong tradition of "mental philosophy". The experimental reports that appeared in Mind in the first two decades of its existence were almost entirely authored by Americans, especially G. Stanley Hall and his students (notably Henry Herbert Donaldson) and James McKeen Cattell.
Francis Galton's (18221911) anthropometric laboratory opened in 1884. There people were tested on a wide variety of physical (e.g., strength of blow) and perceptual (e.g., visual acuity) attributes. In 1886 Galton was visited by James McKeen Cattell who would later adapt Galton's techniques in developing his own mental testing research program in the United States. Galton was not primarily a psychologist, however. The data he accumulated in the anthropometric laboratory primarily went toward supporting his case for eugenics. To help interpret the mounds of data he accumulated, Galton developed a number of important statistical techniques, including the precursors to the scatterplot and the product-moment correlation coefficient (later perfected by Karl Pearson, 18571936).
Soon after, Charles Spearman (18631945) developed the correlation-based statistical procedure of factor analysis in the process of building a case for his two-factor theory of intelligence, published in 1901. Spearman believed that people have an inborn level of general intelligence or g which can be crystallized into a specific skill in any of a number of narrow content area (s, or specific intelligence).
Laboratory psychology of the kind practiced in Germany and the United States was slow in coming to Britain. Although the philosopher James Ward (18431925) urged Cambridge University to establish a psychophysics laboratory from the mid-1870s forward, it was not until the 1891 that they put so much as £50 toward some basic apparatus (Bartlett, 1937). A laboratory was established through the assistance of the physiology department in 1897 and a lectureship in psychology was established which first went to W. H. R. Rivers (18641922). Soon Rivers was joined by C. S. Myers (18731946) and William McDougall (18711938). This group showed as much interest in anthropology as psychology, going with Alfred Cort Haddon (18551940) on the famed Torres Straits expedition of 1898.
In 1901 the Psychological Society was established (which renamed itself the British Psychological Society in 1906), and in 1904 Ward and Rivers co-founded the British Journal of Psychology.
== Early Russian ==
Insofar as psychology was regarded as the science of the soul and institutionally part of philosophy courses in theology schools, psychology was present in Russia from the second half of the 18th century. By contrast, if by psychology we mean a separate discipline, with university chairs and people employed as psychologists, then it appeared only after the October Revolution. All the same, by the end of the 19th century, many different kinds of activities called psychology had spread in philosophy, natural science, literature, medicine, education, legal practice, and even military science. Psychology was as much a cultural resource as it was a defined area of scholarship.
The question, "Who Is to Develop Psychology and How?", was of such importance that Ivan Sechenov, a physiologist and doctor by training and a teacher in institutions of higher education, chose it as the title for an essay in 1873. His question was rhetorical, for he was already convinced that physiology was the scientific basis on which to build psychology. The response to Sechenov's popular essay included one, in 18721873, from a liberal professor of law, Konstantin Kavelin. He supported a psychology drawing on ethnographic materials about national character, a program that had existed since 1847, when the ethnographic division of the recently founded Russian Geographical Society circulated a request for information on the people's way of life, including "intellectual and moral abilities". This was part of a larger debate about national character, national resources, and national development, in the context of which a prominent linguist, Alexander Potebnja, began, in 1862, to publish studies of the relation between mentality and language.
Although it was the history and philology departments that traditionally taught courses in psychology, it was the medical schools that first introduced psychological laboratories and courses on experimental psychology. As early as the 1860s and 1870s, I. M. Balinskii (18271902) at the Military-Surgical Academy (which changed its name in the 1880s to the Military Medical Academy) in St. Petersburg and Sergey Korsakov, a psychiatrist at Moscow university, began to purchase psychometric apparatus. Vladimir Bekhterev created the first laboratory—a special space for psychological experiments—in Kazan' in 1885. At a meeting of the Moscow Psychological Society in 1887, the psychiatrists Grigory Rossolimo and Ardalion Tokarskii (18591901) demonstrated both Wundt's experiments and hypnosis. In 1895, Tokarskii set up a psychological laboratory in the psychiatric clinic of Moscow university with the support of its head, Korsakov, to teach future psychiatrists about what he promoted as new and necessary techniques.
In January 1884, the philosophers Matvei Troitskii and Iakov Grot founded the Moscow Psychological Society. They wished to discuss philosophical issues, but because anything called "philosophical" could attract official disapproval, they used "psychological" as a euphemism. In 1907, Georgy Chelpanov announced a 3-year course in psychology based on laboratory work and a well-structured teaching seminar. In the following years, Chelpanov traveled in Europe and the United States to see existing institutes; the result was a luxurious four-story building for the Psychological Institute of Moscow with well-equipped laboratories, opening formally on March 23, 1914.
== Second generation German ==

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=== Würzburg School ===
In 1896, one of Wilhelm Wundt's former Leipzig laboratory assistants, Oswald Külpe (18621915), founded a new laboratory in Würzburg. Külpe soon surrounded himself with a number of younger psychologists, the so-called Würzburg School, most notably Narziß Ach (18711946), Karl Bühler (18791963), Ernst Dürr (18781913), Karl Marbe (18691953), and Henry Jackson Watt (18791925). Collectively, they developed a new approach to psychological experimentation that flew in the face of many of Wundt's restrictions. Wundt had drawn a distinction between the old philosophical style of self-observation (Selbstbeobachtung) in which one introspected for extended durations on higher thought processes, and inner perception (innere Wahrnehmung) in which one could be immediately aware of a momentary sensation, feeling, or image (Vorstellung). The former was declared to be impossible by Wundt, who argued that higher thought could not be studied experimentally through extended introspection, but only humanistically through Völkerpsychologie (folk psychology). Only the latter was a proper subject for experimentation.
The Würzburgers, by contrast, designed experiments in which the experimental subject was presented with a complex stimulus (for example a Nietzschean aphorism or a logical problem) and after processing it for a time (for example interpreting the aphorism or solving the problem), retrospectively reported to the experimenter all that had passed through his consciousness during the interval. In the process, the Würzburgers claimed to have discovered a number of new elements of consciousness (over and above Wundt's sensations, feelings, and images) including Bewußtseinslagen (conscious sets), Bewußtheiten (awarenesses), and Gedanken (thoughts). In the English-language literature, these are often collectively termed "imageless thoughts", and the debate between Wundt and the Würzburgers, the "imageless thought controversy".
Wundt referred to the Würzburgers' studies as "sham" experiments and criticized them vigorously. Wundt's most significant English student, Edward Bradford Titchener, then working at Cornell, intervened in the dispute, claiming to have conducted extended introspective studies in which he was able to resolve the Würzburgers' imageless thoughts into sensations, feelings, and images. He thus, paradoxically, used a method of which Wundt did not approve in order to affirm Wundt's view of the situation.
The imageless thought debate is often said to have been instrumental in undermining the legitimacy of all introspective methods in experimental psychology and, ultimately, in bringing about the behaviorist revolution in American psychology. It was not without its own delayed legacy, however. Herbert A. Simon (1981) cites the work of one Würzburg psychologist in particular, Otto Selz (18811943), for having inspired him to develop his famous problem-solving computer algorithms (such as Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver) and his "thinking out loud" method for protocol analysis. In addition, Karl Popper studied psychology under Bühler and Selz in the 1920s, and appears to have brought some of their influence, unattributed, to his philosophy of science.
=== Gestalt psychology ===

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Whereas the Würzburgers debated with Wundt mainly on matters of method, another German movement, centered in Berlin, took issue with the widespread assumption that the aim of psychology should be to break consciousness down into putative basic elements. Instead, they argued that the psychological "whole" has priority and that the "parts" are defined by the structure of the whole, rather than vice versa. Thus, the school was named Gestalt, a German term meaning approximately "form" or "configuration". It was led by Max Wertheimer (18801943), Wolfgang Köhler (18871967), and Kurt Koffka (18861941). Wertheimer had been a student of Austrian philosopher, Christian von Ehrenfels (18591932), who claimed that in addition to the sensory elements of a perceived object, there is an extra element which, though in some sense derived from the organization of the standard sensory elements, is also to be regarded as an element in its own right. He called this extra element Gestalt-qualität or "form-quality". For instance, when one hears a melody, one hears the notes plus something in addition to them which binds them together into a tune the Gestalt-qualität. It is the presence of this Gestalt-qualität which, according to Ehrenfels, allows a tune to be transposed to a new key, using completely different notes, but still retain its identity. Wertheimer took the more radical line that "what is given me by the melody does not arise ... as a secondary process from the sum of the pieces as such. Instead, what takes place in each single part already depends upon what the whole is", (1925/1938). In other words, one hears the melody first and only then may perceptually divide it up into notes. Similarly in vision, one sees the form of the circle first it is given "im-mediately" (i.e. its apprehension is not mediated by a process of part-summation). Only after this primary apprehension might one notice that it is made up of lines or dots or stars.
Gestalt-Theorie (Gestalt psychology) was officially initiated in 1912 in an article by Wertheimer on the phi-phenomenon; a perceptual illusion in which two stationary but alternately flashing lights appear to be a single light moving from one location to another. Contrary to popular opinion, his primary target was not behaviorism, as it was not yet a force in psychology. The aim of his criticism was, rather, the atomistic psychologies of Hermann von Helmholtz (18211894), Wilhelm Wundt (18321920), and other European psychologists of the time.
The two men who served as Wertheimer's subjects in the phi experiment were Köhler and Koffka. Köhler was an expert in physical acoustics, having studied under physicist Max Planck (18581947), but had taken his degree in psychology under Carl Stumpf (18481936). Koffka was also a student of Stumpf's, having studied movement phenomena and psychological aspects of rhythm. In 1917 Köhler (1917/1925) published the results of four years of research on learning in chimpanzees. Köhler showed, contrary to the claims of most other learning theorists, that animals can learn by "sudden insight" into the "structure" of a problem, over and above the associative and incremental manner of learning that Ivan Pavlov (18491936) and Edward Lee Thorndike (18741949) had demonstrated with dogs and cats, respectively.
The terms "structure" and "organization" were focal for the Gestalt psychologists. Stimuli were said to have a certain structure, to be organized in a certain way, and that it is to this structural organization, rather than to individual sensory elements, that the organism responds. When an animal is conditioned, it does not simply respond to the absolute properties of a stimulus, but to its properties relative to its surroundings. To use a favorite example of Köhler's, if conditioned to respond in a certain way to the lighter of two gray cards, the animal generalizes the relation between the two stimuli rather than the absolute properties of the conditioned stimulus: it will respond to the lighter of two cards in subsequent trials even if the darker card in the test trial is of the same intensity as the lighter one in the original training trials.
In 1921 Koffka published a Gestalt-oriented text on developmental psychology, Growth of the Mind. With the help of American psychologist Robert Ogden, Koffka introduced the Gestalt point of view to an American audience in 1922 by way of a paper in Psychological Bulletin. It contains criticisms of then-current explanations of a number of problems of perception, and the alternatives offered by the Gestalt school. Koffka moved to the United States in 1924, eventually settling at Smith College in 1927. In 1935 Koffka published his Principles of Gestalt Psychology. This textbook laid out the Gestalt vision of the scientific enterprise as a whole. Science, he said, is not the simple accumulation of facts. What makes research scientific is the incorporation of facts into a theoretical structure. The goal of the Gestaltists was to integrate the facts of inanimate nature, life, and mind into a single scientific structure. This meant that science would have to swallow not only what Koffka called the quantitative facts of physical science but the facts of two other "scientific categories": questions of order and questions of Sinn, a German word which has been variously translated as significance, value, and meaning. Without incorporating the meaning of experience and behavior, Koffka believed that science would doom itself to trivialities in its investigation of human beings.
Having survived the onslaught of the Nazis up to the mid-1930s, all the core members of the Gestalt movement were forced out of Germany to the United States by 1935. Köhler published another book, Dynamics in Psychology, in 1940 but thereafter the Gestalt movement suffered a series of setbacks. Koffka died in 1941 and Wertheimer in 1943. Wertheimer's long-awaited book on mathematical problem-solving, Productive Thinking, was published posthumously in 1945 but Köhler was now left to guide the movement without his two long-time colleagues.
== Emergence of behaviorism in America ==

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As a result of the conjunction of a number of events in the early 20th century, behaviorism gradually emerged as the dominant school in American psychology. First among these was the increasing skepticism with which many viewed the concept of consciousness: although still considered to be the essential element separating psychology from physiology, its subjective nature and the unreliable introspective method it seemed to require, troubled many. William James' 1904 Journal of Philosophy.... article "Does Consciousness Exist?", laid out the worries explicitly.
Second was the gradual rise of a rigorous animal psychology. In addition to Edward Lee Thorndike's work with cats in puzzle boxes in 1898, the start of research in which rats learn to navigate mazes was begun by Willard Small (1900, 1901 in American Journal of Psychology). Robert M. Yerkes's 1905 Journal of Philosophy... article "Animal Psychology and the Criteria of the Psychic" raised the general question of when one is entitled to attribute consciousness to an organism. The following few years saw the emergence of John Broadus Watson (18781959) as a major player, publishing his dissertation on the relation between neurological development and learning in the white rat (1907, Psychological Review Monograph Supplement; Carr & Watson, 1908, J. Comparative Neurology & Psychology). Another important rat study was published by Henry H. Donaldson (1908, J. Comparative Neurology & Psychology). The year 1909 saw the first English-language account of Ivan Pavlov's studies of conditioning in dogs (Yerkes & Morgulis, 1909, Psychological Bulletin).
A third factor was the rise of Watson to a position of significant power within the psychological community. In 1908, Watson was offered a junior position at Johns Hopkins by James Mark Baldwin. In addition to heading the Johns Hopkins department, Baldwin was the editor of the influential journals, Psychological Review and Psychological Bulletin. Only months after Watson's arrival, Baldwin was forced to resign his professorship due to scandal. Watson was suddenly made head of the department and editor of Baldwin's journals. He resolved to use these powerful tools to revolutionize psychology in the image of his own research. In 1913 he published in Psychological Review the article that is often called the "manifesto" of the behaviorist movement, "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It". There he argued that psychology "is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science", "introspection forms no essential part of its methods..." and "The behaviorist... recognizes no dividing line between man and brute". The following year, 1914, his first textbook, Behavior went to press. Although behaviorism took some time to be accepted as a comprehensive approach (see Samelson, 1981), (in no small part because of the intervention of World War I), by the 1920s Watson's revolution was well underway. The central tenet of early behaviorism was that psychology should be a science of behavior, not of the mind, and rejected internal mental states such as beliefs, desires, or goals. Watson himself, however, was forced out of Johns Hopkins by scandal in 1920. Although he continued to publish during the 1920s, he eventually moved on to a career in advertising (see Coon, 1994).
Among the behaviorists who continued on, there were a number of disagreements about the best way to proceed. Neo-behaviorists such as Edward C. Tolman, Edwin Guthrie, Clark L. Hull, and B. F. Skinner debated issues such as (1) whether to reformulate the traditional psychological vocabulary in behavioral terms or discard it in favor of a wholly new scheme, (2) whether learning takes place all at once or gradually, (3) whether biological drives should be included in the new science in order to provide a "motivation" for behavior, and (4) to what degree any theoretical framework is required over and above the measured effects of reinforcement and punishment on learning. By the late 1950s, Skinner's formulation had become dominant, and it remains a part of the modern discipline under the rubric of Behavior Analysis. Its application (Applied Behavior Analysis) has become one of the most useful fields of psychology.
Behaviorism was the ascendant experimental model for research in psychology for much of the 20th century, largely due to the creation and successful application (not least of which in advertising) of conditioning theories as scientific models of human behaviour.
== Second generation francophone ==
=== Genevan School ===
In 1918, Jean Piaget (18961980) turned away from his early training in natural history and began post-doctoral work in psychoanalysis in Zurich. Later Piaget rejected psychoanalysis, as he thought it was insufficiently empirical. In 1919, he moved to Paris to work at the Binet-Simon Lab. However, Binet had died in 1911 and Simon lived and worked in Rouen. His supervision therefore came (indirectly) from Pierre Janet, Binet's old rival and a professor at the Collège de France.
The job in Paris was relatively simple: to use the statistical techniques he had learned as a natural historian, studying molluscs, to standardize Cyril Burt's intelligence test for use with French children. Yet without direct supervision, he soon found a remedy to this boring work: exploring why children made the mistakes they did. Applying his early training in psychoanalytic interviewing, Piaget began to intervene directly with the children: "Why did you do that?" (etc.) It was from this that the ideas formalized in his later stage theory first emerged.
In 1921, Piaget moved to Geneva to work with Édouard Claparède at the Rousseau Institute. They formed what is now known as the Genevan School. In 1936, Piaget received his first honorary doctorate from Harvard. In 1955, the International Center for Genetic Epistemology was founded: an interdisciplinary collaboration of theoreticians and scientists, devoted to the study of topics related to Piaget's theory. In 1969, Piaget received the "distinguished scientific contributions" award from the American Psychological Association.

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== Soviet Marxist psychology ==
In the early twentieth century, Ivan Pavlov's behavioral and conditioning experiments became the most internationally recognized Russian achievements. With the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922, Marxism was introduced as an overall philosophical and methodological framework in scientific research. In 1920s, state ideology promoted a tendency to the psychology of Bekhterev's reflexologist reductionism in its Marxist interpretation and to historical materialism, while idealistic philosophers and psychologists were harshly criticized. Another variation of Marxist version of psychology that got popularity mostly in Moscow and centered in the local Institute of Psychology was Konstantin Kornilov's (the Director of this Institute) reactology that became the main view, besides a small group of the members of the Vygotsky-Luria Circle that, besides its namesakes Lev Vygotsky, and Alexander Luria, included Bluma Zeigarnik, Alexei Leontiev and others, and in 1920s embraced a deterministic "instrumental psychology" version of Cultural-historical psychology. Many works by Vygotsky were not published chronologically because of Soviet censorship but primarily because of Vygotsky's failure to build a consistent psychological theory of consciousness,
A few attempts were made in 1920s at formulating the core of theoretical framework of the "genuinely Marxist" psychology, but all these failed and were characterized in early 1930s as either right- or left-wing deviations of reductionist "mechanicism" or "menshevising idealism". It was Sergei Rubinstein in mid 1930s, who formulated the key principles, on which the entire Soviet variation of Marxist psychology would be based, and, thus become the genuine pioneer and the founder of this psychological discipline in the Marxist disguise in the Soviet Union.
In late 1940s-early 1950s, Lysenkoism somewhat affected Russian psychology, yet gave it a considerable impulse for a reaction and unification that resulted in institutional and disciplinary integration of psychological community in the postwar Soviet Union.
== Cognitivism ==
Noam Chomsky's (1959) review of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior (which aimed to explain language acquisition in a behaviorist framework) is considered one of the major theoretical challenges to the type of radical (as in 'root') behaviorism that Skinner taught. Chomsky claimed that language could not be learned solely from the sort of operant conditioning that Skinner postulated. Chomsky argued that people could produce an infinite variety of sentences unique in structure and meaning and that these could not possibly be generated solely through the experience of natural language. As an alternative, he concluded that there must be internal mental structures states of mind of the sort that behaviorism rejected as illusory. The issue is not whether mental activities exist; it is whether they can be shown to be the causes of behavior. Similarly, the work by Albert Bandura showed that children could learn by social observation, without any change in overt behaviour, and so must (according to him) be accounted for by internal representations.
The rise of computer technology also promoted the metaphor of mental function as information processing. This, combined with a scientific approach to studying the mind, as well as a belief in internal mental states, led to the rise of cognitivism as the dominant model of the mind.
Links between brain and nervous system function were also becoming common, partly due to the experimental work of people like Charles Sherrington and Donald Hebb, and partly due to studies of people with brain injury (see cognitive neuropsychology). With the development of technologies for accurately measuring brain function, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience have become some of the most active areas in contemporary psychology.
With the increasing involvement of other disciplines (such as philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience) in the quest to understand the mind, the umbrella discipline of cognitive science has been created as a means of focusing such efforts constructively.
== Scholarly journals ==
There are three "primary journals" where specialist histories of psychology are published:
History of Psychology (journal)
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
History of the Human Sciences
In addition, there are a large number of "friendly journals" where historical material can often be found.Burman, J. T. (2018). "What Is History of Psychology? Network Analysis of Journal Citation Reports, 2009-2015". SAGE Open. 8 (1) 2158244018763005: 215824401876300. doi:10.1177/2158244018763005. These are discussed in History of Psychology (discipline).
== See also ==
== Notes ==
== References ==
== External links ==
=== Scholarly societies and associations ===
Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral & Social Sciences
European Society for the History of the Human Sciences
Forum for the History of Human Science
History & Philosophy Section of the British Psychological Society
History & Philosophy of Psychology Section of the Canadian Psychological Association
Society for the History of Psychology (American Psychological Association Division 26)
=== Internet resources ===
History of Psychology History of Psychology - Poster with visual overview.
==== E-textbooks ====
The History of Psychology - e-text about the historical and philosophical background of psychology by C. George Boeree
Mind and Body: René Descartes to William James e-text by Robert H. Wozniak
History of Psychology Textbook Chapter Archived 2019-10-23 at the Wayback Machine
Gerhard Medicus (2017). Being Human Bridging the Gap between the Sciences of Body and Mind, Berlin VWB
==== Collections of primary source texts ====
Classics in the History of Psychology - on-line full texts of 250+ historically significant primary source articles, chapters, & books, ed. by Christopher D. Green
Fondation Jean Piaget - Collection of primary sources by, and secondary sources about, Jean Piaget (in French; edited by Jean-Jacques Ducret and Wolfgang Schachner)
The Mead Project - collection of writings by George Herbert Mead and other related thinkers (e.g., Dewey, James, Baldwin, Cooley, Veblen, Sapir), ed. by Lloyd Gordon Ward and Robert Throop
Sir Francis Galton, F.R.S.
William James Site Archived 2008-11-05 at the Wayback Machine ed. by Frank Pajares
History of Phrenology on the Web ed. by John van Wyhe
Frederic Bartlett Archive - A collection of Bartlett's own writings and related material maintained by Humboldt Prize Winner Professor Brady Wagoner (University of Aalborg), the late Professor Gerard Duveen (University of Cambridge) and Professor Alex Gillespie (LSE)
==== Collections of secondary scholarship on the history of psychology ====
History & Theory of Psychology Eprint Archive - Open access on-line depository of articles on the history and theory of psychology
Advances in the History of Psychology - Blog edited by Jeremy Burman of York University (Toronto, Canada), advised by Christopher D. Green
==== Websites of physical archives ====
The Archives of the History of American Psychology - Large collection of documents and objects at the University of Akron, directed by David Baker
Archives of the American Psychological Association directed by Wade Pickren
Archives of the British Psychological Society
==== Multimedia resources ====
An Academy in Crisis: The Hiring of James Mark Baldwin and James Gibson Hume at the University of Toronto in 1889 - 40-min. video documentary by Christopher D. Green
Toward a School of Their Own: The Prehistory of American Functionalist Psychology - 64-min. video documentary by Christopher D. Green
This Week in the History of Psychology - 30-episode podcast series by Christopher D. Green

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Socrates of Athens (c. 470 399 BC). Emphasized virtue ethics. In epistemology, understood dialectic to be central to the pursuit of truth.
As early as the 4th century BC, the Greek physician Hippocrates theorized that mental disorders had physical rather than supernatural causes.
Plato's tripartite theory of the soul, Chariot Allegory and concepts such as eros defined the subsequent Western Philosophy views of the psyche and anticipated modern psychological proposals.
Alcmaeon theorizes the brain in the seat of the mind.
In 387 BC, Plato suggested that the brain is where mental processes take place.
Boethius and his work represented an imaginary psychological dialogue between himself and philosophy, with philosophy personified as a woman, arguing that despite the apparent inequality of the world.
In the 6th century AD, Lin Xie carried out an early psychological analysis experiment. It has been cited that this was the first psychology experiment.
Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari, who developed al-ilaj al-nafs (sometimes translated as "psychotherapy"),
Padmasambhava was the 8th-century medicine Buddha of Tibet, called from the then Buddhist India to tame the Tibetans, and was instrumental in developing Tibetan psychiatric medicine.
Patanjali founded Yoga and the method of psychological balance and resilience through breathing exercises and inner peace.
Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis), described head surgery.
Ibn Tufail, who anticipated the tabula rasa argument and nature versus nurture debate.
William of Ockham who has lot of interests in writing about logic and invented occams razor.
Thomas Aquinas whose works allocated notion regarded emotions.
Albertus magnus describes metaphysical morals in psychology and philosophical theories.
Maimonides described rabies and belladonna intoxication.
Witelo is considered a precursor of perception psychology. His Perspectiva contains much material in psychology, outlining views that are close to modern notions on the association of idea and on the subconscious.
== Further development ==
Many of the Ancients' writings would have been lost without the efforts of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish translators in the House of Wisdom, the House of Knowledge, and other such institutions in the Islamic Golden Age, whose glosses and commentaries were later translated into Latin in the 12th century. However, it is not clear how these sources first came to be used during the Renaissance, and their influence on what would later emerge as the discipline of psychology is a topic of scholarly debate.
=== Etymology and the early usage of the word ===
The first print use of the term "psychology", that is, Greek-inspired neo-Latin psychologia, is dated to multiple works dated 1525. Etymology has long been attributed to the German scholastic philosopher Rudolf Göckel (15471628, often known under the Latin form Rodolphus Goclenius), who published the Psychologia hoc est: de hominis perfectione, animo et imprimis ortu hujus... in Marburg in 1590. Croatian humanist Marko Marulić (14501524) likely used the term in the title of a Latin treatise entitled Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae (c.15101517). Although the treatise itself has not been preserved, its title appears in a list of Marulic's works compiled by his younger contemporary, Franjo Bozicevic-Natalis in his "Vita Marci Maruli Spalatensis" (Krstić, 1964).
The term did not come into popular usage until the German Rationalist philosopher, Christian Wolff (16791754) used it in his works Psychologia empirica (1732) and Psychologia rationalis (1734). This distinction between empirical and rational psychology was picked up in Denis Diderot's (17131780) and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's (17171783) Encyclopédie (17511784) and was popularized in France by Maine de Biran (17661824). In England, the term "psychology" overtook "mental philosophy" in the middle of the 19th century, especially in the work of William Hamilton (17881856).

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=== Enlightenment psychological thought ===
Early psychology was regarded as the study of the soul (in the Christian sense of the term). The modern philosophical form of psychology was heavily influenced by the works of René Descartes (15961650), and the debates that he generated, of which the most relevant were the objections to his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), published with the text. Also important to the later development of psychology were his Passions of the Soul (1649) and Treatise on Man (completed in 1632 but, along with the rest of The World, withheld from publication after Descartes heard of the Catholic Church's condemnation of Galileo; it was eventually published posthumously, in 1664).
Although not educated as a physician, Descartes did extensive anatomical studies of bulls' hearts and was considered important enough that William Harvey responded to him. Descartes was one of the first to endorse Harvey's model of the circulation of the blood, but disagreed with his metaphysical framework to explain it. Descartes dissected animals and human cadavers and as a result was familiar with the research on the flow of blood leading to the conclusion that the body is a complex device that is capable of moving without the soul, thus contradicting the "Doctrine of the Soul". The emergence of psychology as a medical discipline was given a major boost by Thomas Willis, not only in his reference to psychology (the "Doctrine of the Soul") in terms of brain function, but through his detailed 1672 anatomical work, and his treatise De anima brutorum quae hominis vitalis ac sentitiva est: exercitationes duae ("Two Discourses on the Souls of Brutes"—meaning "beasts"). However, Willis acknowledged the influence of Descartes's rival, Pierre Gassendi, as an inspiration for his work.
The philosophers of the British Empiricist and Associationist schools had a profound impact on the later course of experimental psychology. John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), George Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (17391740) were particularly influential, as were David Hartley's Observations on Man (1749) and John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic. (1843). Also notable was the work of some Continental Rationalist philosophers, especially Baruch Spinoza's (16321677) On the Improvement of the Understanding (1662) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's (16461716) New Essays on Human Understanding (completed 1705, published 1765). Another important contribution was Friedrich August Rauch's (18061841) book Psychology: Or, A View of the Human Soul; Including Anthropology (1840), the first English exposition of Hegelian philosophy for an American audience.
German idealism pioneered the proposition of the unconscious, which Jung considered to have been described psychologically for the first time by physician and philosopher Carl Gustav Carus. Also notable was its use by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (17751835), and by Eduard von Hartmann in Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869); psychologist Hans Eysenck writes in Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985) that Hartmann's version of the unconscious is very similar to Freud's.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard also influenced the humanistic, existential, and modern psychological schools with his works The Concept of Anxiety (1844) and The Sickness Unto Death (1849).

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=== Transition to contemporary psychology ===
Also influential on the emerging discipline of psychology were debates surrounding the efficacy of Mesmerism (a precursor to hypnosis) and the value of phrenology. The former was developed in the 1770s by Austrian physician Franz Mesmer (17341815) who claimed to use the power of gravity, and later of "animal magnetism", to cure various physical and mental ills. As Mesmer and his treatment became increasingly fashionable in both Vienna and Paris, it also began to come under the scrutiny of suspicious officials. In 1784, an investigation was commissioned in Paris by King Louis XVI which included American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, chemist Antoine Lavoisier and physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (later the popularizer of the guillotine). They concluded that Mesmer's method was useless. Abbé Faria, an Indo-Portuguese priest, revived public attention in animal magnetism. Unlike Mesmer, Faria claimed that the effect was 'generated from within the mind' by the power of expectancy and cooperation of the patient.
Although disputed, the "magnetic" tradition continued among Mesmer's students and others, resurfacing in England in the 19th century in the work of the physician John Elliotson (17911868), and the surgeons James Esdaile (18081859), and James Braid (17951860) (who reconceptualized it as property of the subject's mind rather than a "power" of the Mesmerist's, and relabeled it "hypnotism"). Mesmerism also continued to have a strong social (if not medical) following in England through the 19th century (see Winter, 1998). Faria's approach was significantly extended by the clinical and theoretical work of Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim of the Nancy School. Faria's theoretical position, and the subsequent experiences of those in the Nancy School made significant contributions to the later autosuggestion techniques of Émile Coué. It was adopted for the treatment of hysteria by the director of Paris's Salpêtrière Hospital, Jean-Martin Charcot (18251893).
Phrenology began as "organology", a theory of brain structure developed by the German physician, Franz Joseph Gall (17581828). Gall argued that the brain is divided into a large number of functional "organs", each responsible for particular human mental abilities and dispositions hope, love, spirituality, greed, language, the abilities to detect the size, form, and color of objects, etc. He argued that the larger each of these organs are, the greater the power of the corresponding mental trait. Further, he argued that one could detect the sizes of the organs in a given individual by feeling the surface of that person's skull. Gall's ultra-localizationist position with respect to the brain was soon attacked, most notably by French anatomist Pierre Flourens (17941867), who conducted ablation studies (on chickens) which purported to demonstrate little or no cerebral localization of function. Although Gall had been a serious (if misguided) researcher, his theory was taken by his assistant, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (17761832), and developed into the profitable, popular enterprise of phrenology, which soon spawned, especially in Britain, a thriving industry of independent practitioners. In the hands of Scottish religious leader George Combe (17881858) (whose book The Constitution of Man was one of the best-sellers of the century), phrenology became strongly associated with political reform movements and egalitarian principles (see, e.g., Shapin, 1975; but also see van Wyhe, 2004). Spurzheim soon spread phrenology to America as well, where itinerant practical phrenologists assessed the mental well-being of willing customers (see Sokal, 2001; Thompson 2021).
The development of modern psychology was closely linked to psychiatry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see History of psychiatry), when the treatment of the mentally ill in hospices was revolutionized after Europeans first considered their pathological conditions. In fact, there was no distinction between the two areas in psychotherapeutic practice, in an era when there was still no drug treatment (of the so-called psychopharmacologicy revolution from 1950) for mental disorders, and its early theorists and pioneering clinical psychologists generally had medical background. The first to implement in the Western a humanitarian and scientific treatment of mental health, based on Enlightenment ideas, were the French alienists, who developed the empirical observation of psychopathology, describing the clinical conditions, their physiological relationships and classifying them. It was called the rationalist-empirical school, which most known exponents were Pinel, Esquirol, Falret, Morel and Magnan. In the late nineteenth century, the French current was gradually overcome by the German field of study. At first, the German school was influenced by romantic ideals and gave rise to a line of mental process speculators, based more on empathy than reason. They became known as Psychiker, mentalists or psychologists, with different currents being highlighted by Reil (creator of the word "psychiatry"), Heinroth (first to use the term "psychosomatic") Ideler and Carus. In the middle of the century, a "somatic reaction" (somatiker) formed against the speculative doctrines of mentalism, and it was based on neuroanatomy and neuropathology. In it, those who made important contributions to the psychopathological classification were Griesinger, Westphal, Krafft-Ebbing and Kahlbaum, which, in their turn, would influence Wernicke and Meynert. Kraepelin revolutionized as the first to define the diagnostic aspects of mental disorders in syndromes, and the work of psychological classification was followed to the contemporary field by contributions from Schneider, Kretschmer, Leonhard, and Jaspers. In Great Britain, there stand out in the nineteenth century Alexander Bain founder of the first journal of psychology, Mind, and writer of reference books on the subject at the time, such as Mental Science: The Compendium of Psychology, and the History of Philosophy (1868), and Henry Maudsley. In Switzerland, Bleuler coined the terms "depth psychology", "schizophrenia", "schizoid" and "autism". In the United States, the Swiss psychiatrist Adolf Meyer maintained that the patient should be regarded as an integrated "psychobiological" whole and emphasized psychosocial factors, lending support to early conceptions of "psychosomatic medicine", a precursor to behavioral medicine and other fields.

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== Emergence of German experimental psychology ==
Until the middle of the 19th century, psychology was widely regarded as a branch of philosophy. Whether it could become an independent scientific discipline was questioned already earlier on: Immanuel Kant (17241804) declared in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) that psychology might perhaps never become a "proper" natural science because its phenomena cannot be quantified, among other reasons. Kant proposed an alternative conception of an empirical investigation of human thought, feeling, desire, and action, and lectured on these topics for over twenty years (1772/731795/96). His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), which resulted from these lectures, looks like an empirical psychology in many respects.
Johann Friedrich Herbart (17761841) took issue with what he viewed as Kant's conclusion and attempted to develop a mathematical basis for a scientific psychology. Although he was unable to empirically realize the terms of his psychological theory, his efforts did lead scientists such as Ernst Heinrich Weber (17951878) and Gustav Theodor Fechner (18011887) to attempt to measure the mathematical relationships between the physical magnitudes of external stimuli and the psychological intensities of the resulting sensations. Fechner (1860) is the originator of the term psychophysics.
Meanwhile, individual differences in reaction time had become a critical issue in the field of astronomy, under the name of the "personal equation". Early researches by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (17841846) in Königsberg and Adolf Hirsch led to the development of a highly precise chronoscope by Matthäus Hipp that, in turn, was based on a design by Charles Wheatstone for a device that measured the speed of artillery shells (Edgell & Symes, 1906). Other timing instruments were borrowed from physiology (e.g., Carl Ludwig's kymograph) and adapted for use by the Utrecht ophthalmologist Franciscus Donders (18181899) and his student Johan Jacob de Jaager in measuring the duration of simple mental decisions.
The 19th century was also the period in which physiology, including neurophysiology, professionalized and saw some of its most significant discoveries. Among its leaders were Charles Bell (17741843) and François Magendie (17831855) who independently discovered the distinction between sensory and motor nerves in the spinal column, Johannes Müller (18011855) who proposed the doctrine of specific nerve energies, Emil du Bois-Reymond (18181896) who studied the electrical basis of muscle contraction, Pierre Paul Broca (18241880) and Carl Wernicke (18481905) who identified areas of the brain responsible for different aspects of language, as well as Gustav Fritsch (18371927), Eduard Hitzig (18391907), and David Ferrier (18431924) who localized sensory and motor areas of the brain. One of the principal founders of experimental physiology, Hermann Helmholtz (18211894), conducted studies of a wide range of topics that would later be of interest to psychologists the speed of neural transmission, the natures of sound and color, and of our perceptions of them, etc. In the 1860s, while he held a position in Heidelberg, Helmholtz engaged as an assistant a young physician named Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt employed the equipment of the physiology laboratory chronoscope, kymograph, and various peripheral devices to address more complicated psychological questions than had, until then, been investigated experimentally. In particular he was interested in the nature of apperception the point at which a perception occupies the central focus of conscious awareness.
In 1864 Wundt took up a professorship in Zürich, where he published his landmark textbook, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology, 1874). Moving to a more prestigious professorship in Leipzig in 1875, Wundt founded a laboratory specifically dedicated to original research in experimental psychology in 1879, the first laboratory of its kind in the world. In 1883, he launched a journal in which to publish the results of his, and his students', research, Philosophische Studien (Philosophical Studies) (For more on Wundt, see, e.g., Bringmann & Tweney, 1980; Rieber & Robinson, 2001). Wundt attracted a large number of students not only from Germany, but also from abroad. Among his most influential American students were G. Stanley Hall (who had already obtained a PhD from Harvard under the supervision of William James), James McKeen Cattell (who was Wundt's first assistant), and Frank Angell (who founded laboratories at both Cornell and Stanford). The most influential British student was Edward Bradford Titchener (who later became professor at Cornell).
Experimental psychology laboratories were soon also established at Berlin by Carl Stumpf (18481936) and at Göttingen by Georg Elias Müller (18501934). Another major German experimental psychologist of the era, though he did not direct his own research institute, was Hermann Ebbinghaus (18501909).
== Psychoanalysis ==

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Experimentation was not the only approach to psychology in the German-speaking world at this time. Starting in the 1890s, employing the case study technique, the Viennese physician Sigmund Freud developed and applied the methods of hypnosis, free association, and dream interpretation to reveal putatively unconscious beliefs and desires that he argued were the underlying causes of his patients' "hysteria". He dubbed this approach psychoanalysis. Freudian psychoanalysis is particularly notable for the emphasis it places on the course of an individual's sexual development in pathogenesis. Psychoanalytic concepts have had a strong and lasting influence on Western culture, particularly on the arts. Although its scientific contribution is still a matter of debate, both Freudian and Jungian psychology revealed the existence of compartmentalized thinking, in which some behavior and thoughts are hidden from consciousness yet operative as part of the complete personality. Hidden agendas, a bad conscience, or a sense of guilt, are examples of the existence of mental processes in which the individual is not conscious, through choice or lack of understanding, of some aspects of their personality and subsequent behavior.
Psychoanalysis examines mental processes which affect the ego. An understanding of these theoretically allows the individual greater choice and consciousness with a healing effect in neurosis and occasionally in psychosis, both of which Richard von Krafft-Ebing defined as "diseases of the personality".
Freud founded the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910, inspired also by Ferenczi. Main theoretical successors were Anna Freud (his daughter) and Melane Klein, particularly in child psychoanalysis, both inaugurating competing concepts; in addition to those who became dissidents and developed interpretations different from Freud's psychoanalytic one, thus called by some neo-freudians, or more correctly post-freudians: the most known are Alfred Adler (individual psychology), Carl Gustav Jung (analytical psychology), Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Erik Erikson and Erich Fromm.
Jung was an associate of Freud's who later broke with him over Freud's emphasis on sexuality. Working with concepts of the unconscious first noted during the 1800s (by John Stuart Mill, Krafft-Ebing, Pierre Janet, Théodore Flournoy and others), Jung defined four mental functions which relate to and define the ego, the conscious self:
Sensation, which tell consciousness that something is there.
Feelings, which consist of value judgments, and motivate our reaction to what we have sensed.
Intellect, an analytic function that compares the sensed event to all known others and gives it a class and category, allowing us to understand a situation within a historical process, personal or public.
And intuition, a mental function with access to deep behavioral patterns, being able to suggest unexpected solutions or predict unforeseen consequences, "as if seeing around corners" as Jung put it.
Jung insisted on an empirical psychology on which theories must be based on facts and not on the psychologist's projections or expectations.

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Thorndike, and Robert S. Woodworth, was often regarded as a second (after Chicago) "school" of American Functionalism (see, e.g., Heidbredder, 1933), although they never used that term themselves, because their research focused on the applied areas of mental testing, learning, and education. Dewey was elected president of the APA in 1899, while Titchener dropped his membership in the association. (In 1904, Titchener formed his own group, eventually known as the Society of Experimental Psychologists.) Jastrow promoted the functionalist approach in his APA presidential address of 1900, and Angell adopted Titchener's label explicitly in his influential textbook of 1904 and his APA presidential address of 1906. In reality, Structuralism was, more or less, confined to Titchener and his students. (It was Titchener's former student E. G. Boring, writing A History of Experimental Psychology [1929/1950, the most influential textbook of the 20th century about the discipline], who launched the common idea that the structuralism/functionalism debate was the primary fault line in American psychology at the turn of the 20th century.) Functionalism, broadly speaking, with its more practical emphasis on action and application, better suited the American cultural "style" and, perhaps more important, was more appealing to pragmatic university trustees and private funding agencies.

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== Early French ==
Jules Baillarger founded the Société Médico-Psychologique in 1847, one of the first associations of its kind and which published the Annales Medico-Psychologiques. France already had a pioneering tradition in psychological study, and it was relevant the publication of Précis d'un cours de psychologie ("Summary of a Psychology Course") in 1831 by Adolphe Garnier, who also published the Traité des facultés de l'âme, comprenant l'histoire des principales théories psychologiques ("Treatise of the Faculties of the Soul, comprising the history of major psychological theories") in 1852. Garnier was called "the best monument of psychological science of our time" by Revue des Deux Mondes in 1864.
In no small measure because of the conservatism of the reign of Louis Napoléon (president, 18481852; emperor as "Napoléon III", 18521870), academic philosophy in France through the middle part of the 19th century was controlled by members of the eclectic and spiritualist schools, led by figures such as Victor Cousin (17921867), Thédodore Jouffroy (17961842), and Paul Janet (18231899). These were traditional metaphysical schools, opposed to regarding psychology as a natural science. With the ouster of Napoléon III after the débacle of the Franco-Prussian War, new paths, both political and intellectual, became possible. From the 1870 forward, a steadily increasing interest in positivist, materialist, evolutionary, and deterministic approaches to psychology developed, influenced by, among others, the work of Hyppolyte Taine (18281893) (e.g., De L'Intelligence, 1870) and Théodule Ribot (18391916) (e.g., La Psychologie Anglaise Contemporaine, 1870).
In 1876, Ribot founded Revue Philosophique (the same year as Mind was founded in Britain), which for the next generation would be virtually the only French outlet for the "new" psychology (Plas, 1997). Although not a working experimentalist himself, Ribot's many books were to have profound influence on the next generation of psychologists. These included especially his L'Hérédité Psychologique (1873) and La Psychologie Allemande Contemporaine (1879). In the 1880s, Ribot's interests turned to psychopathology, writing books on disorders of memory (1881), will (1883), and personality (1885), and where he attempted to bring to these topics the insights of general psychology. Although in 1881 he lost a Sorbonne professorship in the History of Psychological Doctrines to traditionalist Jules Soury (18421915), from 1885 to 1889 he taught experimental psychology at the Sorbonne. In 1889 he was awarded a chair at the Collège de France in Experimental and Comparative Psychology, which he held until 1896 (Nicolas, 2002).
France's primary psychological strength lay in the field of psychopathology. The chief neurologist at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Jean-Martin Charcot (18251893), had been using the recently revivied and renamed (see above) practice of hypnosis to "experimentally" produce hysterical symptoms in some of his patients. Two of his students, Alfred Binet (18571911) and Pierre Janet (18591947), adopted and expanded this practice in their own work.
In 1889, Binet and his colleague Henri Beaunis (18301921) co-founded, at the Sorbonne, the first experimental psychology laboratory in France. Just five years later, in 1894, Beaunis, Binet, and a third colleague, Victor Henri (18721940), co-founded the first French journal dedicated to experimental psychology, L'Année Psychologique. In the first years of the 20th century, Binet was requested by the French government to develop a method for the newly founded universal public education system to identify students who would require extra assistance to master the standardized curriculum. In response, with his collaborator Théodore Simon (18731961), he developed the BinetSimon Intelligence Test, first published in 1905 (revised in 1908 and 1911).
Although the test was used to effect in France, it would find its greatest success (and controversy) in the United States, where it was translated into English by Henry H. Goddard (18661957), the director of the Training School for the Feebleminded in Vineland, New Jersey, and his assistant, Elizabeth Kite (a translation of the 1905 edition appeared in the Vineland Bulletin in 1908, but much better known was Kite's 1916 translation of the 1908 edition, which appeared in book form). The translated test was used by Goddard to advance his eugenics agenda with respect to those he deemed congenitally feeble-minded, especially immigrants from non-Western European countries. Binet's test was revised by Stanford professor Lewis M. Terman (18771956) into the StanfordBinet IQ test in 1916.
With Binet's death in 1911, the Sorbonne laboratory and L'Année Psychologique fell to Henri Piéron (18811964). Piéron's orientation was more physiological that Binet's had been.
Pierre Janet became the leading psychiatrist in France, being appointed to the Salpêtrière (18901894), the Sorbonne (18951920), and the Collège de France (19021936). In 1904, he co-founded the Journale de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique with fellow Sorbonne professor Georges Dumas (18661946), a student and faithful follower of Ribot. Whereas Janet's teacher, Charcot, had focused on the neurological bases of hysteria, Janet was concerned to develop a scientific approach to psychopathology as a mental disorder. His theory that mental pathology results from conflict between unconscious and conscious parts of the mind, and that unconscious mental contents may emerge as symptoms with symbolic meanings led to a public priority dispute with Sigmund Freud.

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History of psychology is the academic discipline concerned with studying the history of the study of psychology. Another term would be historiography of psychology. Postsecondary course titles and textbooks often combine history and systems of psychology; one chapter may address the history and tenets of structuralism, a subsequent chapter functionalism, a subsequent chapter behaviorism, etc.
The discipline is related to the history of human science, the history of emotions, and the history of psychiatry. These must be considered separately, however, as they have their own disciplinary norms.
== The new history of psychology ==
It is now common practice, when teaching advanced courses in the history of psychology, to follow Laurel Furumoto in making a distinction between old and new history. This label was intended to recognize a shift in disciplinary norms that first became apparent, in retrospect, in the 1970s. Before that, the history of psychology was harshly criticized by specialist historians of science for being celebratory and Whiggish.
In other words, the contemporary history of psychology is broadly describable as post-Kuhnian. As a result, it shares traits with contemporary historiography of science, science and technology studies, and the sociology of scientific knowledge. Kurt Danziger's book, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research, is often considered exemplary of this approach.
=== Feminist voices ===
The realization that previous histories had been celebratory led to a search for subjects who had been dismissed for reasons unrelated to their own merit. This effort continues to rediscover extremely significant contributions by women to the formation of psychology, which had become invisible as a result of the way in which the old histories had been written. In this, the influence of E. G. Boring's old history continues to be felt today.
=== Internationalization and indigenization ===
The critique that psychology is itself biased as a science by its focus on WEIRD subjects coincided with a move toward the internationalization of the history of psychology. This now has two main lines—the way in which psychology has developed as a discipline in different geographical locations and the way in which psychological expertise has changed as it has moved between national contexts. This is often referred to simply as indigenization.
== Graduate programs ==
When a university employs a specialist Historian of Psychology to do original research and teach the history course required for accreditation, there is usually only one on staff. However, there are three large research groups in the world that work in English and also offer a PhD:
York University, Canada
University of Groningen, Netherlands
Simon Fraser University, Canada
There are many lower-level programs.
== Scholarly journals ==
There are three primary journals where specialist histories of psychology are published:
History of Psychology
History of the Human Sciences
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
In addition, there are a large number of friendly journals where specialist material can often be found. The most prominent of these include:
American Psychologist
American Journal of Psychology
Isis (journal)
History of Psychiatry (journal)
Science in Context (journal)
British Journal for the History of Science
== Archives ==
Important interpretive work has been done by examining secondary sources. But true historical discoveries are typically made in specialist archives, where unpublished—and sometimes unknown—primary sources can be examined.
Archives of the History of American Psychology
== Prominent historians of psychology ==
David Baker
Ludy Benjamin, Jr
Kurt Danziger
Donald Dewsbury
Raymond E. Fancher
Christopher D. Green
David E. Leary
Wade E. Pickren
Alexandra Rutherford
Stephanie A. Shields
Henderikus J. Stam
Thomas Teo
Andrew Winston
== References ==
== External links ==
York University Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies of Psychology
University of Groningen Theory and History of Psychology
Simon Fraser University History, Quantitative & Theoretical Psychology
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Forum for History of Human Science

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Psychopathy, from psych (soul or mind) and pathy (suffering or disease), was coined by German psychiatrists in the 19th century and originally just meant what would today be called mental disorder, the study of which is still known as psychopathology. By the turn of the century 'psychopathic inferiority' referred to the type of mental disorder that might now be termed personality disorder, along with a wide variety of other conditions now otherwise classified. Through the early 20th century this and other terms such as 'constitutional (inborn) psychopaths' or 'psychopathic personalities', were used very broadly to cover anyone who violated legal or moral expectations or was considered inherently socially undesirable in some way.
The term sociopathy was popularized from 1929/30 by the American psychologist George E. Partridge and was originally intended as an alternative term to indicate that the defining feature was a pervasive failure to adhere to societal norms in a way that could harm others. The term psychopathy also gradually narrowed to the latter sense, based on interpretations of the work of a Scottish psychiatrist and especially checklists popularized by an American psychiatrist and later a Canadian psychologist. Psychopathy became defined in these quarters as a constellation of personality traits allegedly associated with immorality, criminality, or in some cases socioeconomic success.
Official psychiatric diagnostic manuals adopted a mixture of approaches, eventually going by the term antisocial or dissocial personality disorder. In the meantime concepts of psychopaths/sociopaths had become notorious among the general public and as characters in fiction.
== Early literature ==
Labels for personality and behavior patterns consistent with psychopathy exist in most cultures. In rural Nigeria, the term Aranakan, was used by the Yoruba people to describe an individual who "always goes his own way regardless of others, who is uncooperative, full of malice, and bullheaded." Similarly, the word Kunlangeta was used by the Inuit to describe "mind knows what to do but does not do it." The psychiatric anthropologist Jane M. Murphy writes that, in northwest Alaska, the term Kunlangeta might be applied to "a man who… repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting and, when the other men are out of the village, raping many women—someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always brought to the elders for punishment."
Historical descriptions of people or characters are sometimes noted in discussions of psychopathy, with claims of superficial resemblance or retrospective diagnosisfor example, a vignette by Theophrastus in Ancient Greece concerning The Unscrupulous Man. On the other hand, the ancient Greek military statesman Alcibiades has been described as the best example of a probable psychopath due to inconsistent failures despite his potential and confident speaking. Figures of insanity (e.g. vagabonds, libertines, the "mad") have, at least since the 18th century, often represented an image of darkness and threat to society, as later would "the psychopath" a mixture of concepts of dangerousness, evil and illness.
== Early clinical concepts ==
Psychiatric concepts began to develop in the early 19th century which to some extent fed into the use of the term psychopathy from the late 19th century, when that term still had a different and far broader meaning than today. In 1801, French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel described without moral judgment patients who appeared mentally unimpaired but who nonetheless engaged in impulsive and self-defeating acts. He described this as insanity without confusion/delusion (manie sans délire), or rational insanity (la folie raisonnante), and his anecdotes generally described people carried away by instinctive fury (instincte fureur). American Benjamin Rush wrote in 1812 about individuals with an apparent "perversion of the moral faculties", which he saw as a sign of innate defective organization. He also saw such people as objects of compassion whose mental alienation could be helped, even if that was in prison or what he referred to as the "Christian system of criminal jurisprudence". In 1835 English psychiatrist James Cowles Prichard, based partly on Pinel's publications, developed a broad category of mental disorder he called moral insanity - a "madness" of emotional or social dispositions without significant delusions or hallucinations. Generally Prichard referred more to eccentric behaviour than, as had Pinel, out of control passions. Prichard's diagnosis came into widespread use in Europe for several decades. None of these concepts are comparable to current specific constructs of psychopathy, or even to the broader category of personality disorders. Moreover, "moral" did not necessarily refer at that time to morality but to the psychological or emotional faculties.
In the latter half of the 19th century the (pseudo) scientific study of individuals thought to lack a conscience flourished. Notably the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso rejected the view that criminality could occur in anyone and sought to identify particular "born criminals" who he thought showed certain physical signs, such as proportionately long arms or a low and narrow forehead. By the beginning of the 20th century the English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley was writing about not just "moral insanity" but the "moral imbecile" and "criminal psychosis", conditions he believed were genetic in origin and impervious to punishment or correction, and which he applied to the lower class of chronic offenders by comparison to "the higher industrial classes".

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== First uses of term ==
Initially physicians who specialised in mental disorders might be referred to as psychopaths (e.g. the American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1864) and their hospitals as psychopathic institutions (compare to the etymologically similar use of the term homeopathic). Treatments of physical conditions by psychological or spiritualist methods might be referred to as psychopathic.
Up until the 1840s, the term psychopathy was also used in a way consistent with its etymology to refer to any illness of the mind. German psychiatrist von Feuchtersleben's (1845) The Principles of Medical Psychology, which was translated into English, used it in this sense, as well as the roughly equivalent new term psychosis, now traced back to Karl Friedrich Canstatt's Handbuch der Medicinischen Klinik (1841). William Griesinger (1868) and Krafft-Ebing (1886) also notably employed the term in distinct ways.
The use of the term in a criminological context was popularised by a high-profile legal case in Russia between 1883 and 1885, concerning the murder of a girl who had previously lived in Britain for some time, Sarah Becker (Sarra Bekker). The owner of the pawnbroker shop in which she worked and where her body was found, a retired military man Mr Mironovich, was eventually convicted on circumstantial evidence and imprisoned. In the meantime, however, a Ms Semenova had handed herself in saying she had killed Becker while trying to steal jewellery with her lover Bezak, a married policeman, though she soon recanted and changed her confession. Semenova was found not guilty following testimony from eminent Russian psychiatrist Prof Ivan M. Balinsky, who described her as a psychopath, still then a very general term. Dictionaries to this day note this as the first use of the noun, via British or American articles which had suggested a known murderer had been released and in some cases that psychopaths should be immediately hanged.
In 1888 Julius Ludwig August Koch first published on his concept of "psychopathic inferiority" (psychopathische Minderwertigkeiten), which would become influential domestically and internationally. He used it to refer to various kinds of dysfunction or strange conduct noted in patients in the absence of obvious mental illness or retardation. Koch was a Christian and also influenced by the degeneration theory popular in Europe at the time, though he referred to both congenital and acquired types. Habitual criminality was only a small part of his concept but the German public soon used the shortened version "inferiors" to refer to anyone supposedly suffering from an inherent ('constitutional') disposition toward crime.

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== Early 20th century ==
Some writers would still use psychopathy in the general sense of mental illness, such as Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud in Psychopathic Characters on Stage. By contrast influential German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who had previously included a section on moral insanity in his psychiatric classification scheme, was by 1904 referring to specific psychopathic subtypes all involving antisocial, criminal or dissocial behaviour, including: born criminals (inborn delinquents), liars and swindlers, querulous persons, and driven persons (including vagabonds, spendthrifts, and dipsomaniacs). The influential Adolf Meyer (psychiatrist) spread the concept of constitutional psychopathy when he emigrated to the US, though unlike Koch he separated out cases of what was termed psychoneurosis.
After World War I German psychiatrists dropped the term inferiors/defectives (Minderwertigkeiten) and used psychopathic (psychopathisch) and its derivatives instead, at that time a more neutral term covering a wide range of conditions. Emil Kraepelin, Kurt Schneider and Karl Birnbaum developed categorisation schemes under the heading 'psychopathic personality', only some subtypes of which were thought to have particular links to antisocial behaviour. Schneider in particular advanced the term and tried to formulate it in less judgemental terms than Kraepelin, though infamously defining it as those abnormal personalities who suffer from their abnormality or from whose abnormality society suffers. In a similar vein, Birnbaum, a biological psychiatrist, suggested from 1909 a concept similar to sociopathy, implying the social environment could determine whether dispositions became criminal or not.
From 1917 a forerunner to later diagnostic manuals, called the Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane, included a category of 'psychoses with constitutional psychopathic inferiority'. This covered abnormalities in the emotional and volitional spheres associated with episodic disturbances which did not fit into the established categories of psychosis: "The type of behavior disorder, the social reactions, the trends of interests, etc., which the psychopathic inferior may show give special features to many cases, e. g., criminal traits, moral deficiency, tramp life, sexual perversions and various temperamental peculiarities." Constitutional psychopathic inferiority without psychosis was listed separately as one term to apply to patients considered 'Not insane'. Meanwhile, the American Prison Association had its own definition, in which psychopathic personalities were considered non-psychotic and characterized by failure to adjust to environment, lacking purpose, ambition and proper feelings, while often showing tendencies towards delinquency, lying and various eccentricities, perversions or manias (including dromomania (compulsion to travel or experience new lifestyles), kleptomania (stealing), pyromania (fire-setting) etc.). In the UK the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 included the category of moral imbeciles, who were not intellectually idiots but displayed from an early age an alleged mental defect coupled with alleged vicious or criminal propensities, and on whom punishment has little or no deterrent effect. Cyril Burt and others pointed out that 'psychopathic personality' was used in a broader and somewhat different way in America than in the UK.
In the first decades of the 20th century, "constitutional psychopathic inferiority" had become a commonly used term in the US, implying the issue was inherent to the genetics or makeup of the person, an organic disease. As a category it was used to target any and all dysfunctional or antisocial behavior, and in psychiatric categorization it labeled a broad range of alleged mental deviances, including homosexuality. Some courts began to develop "psychopathic laboratories" for the classification and treatment of offenders; the term psychopathic was chosen to avoid the social stigma of "lunacy" or "insanity", while emphasizing variance from normality rather than simply a mental hygiene issue. Nevertheless, at least one such laboratory issued a report on eugenic sterilization initiatives. From the 1930s, "sexual psychopath" laws (a term going back to Krafft-Ebing) started to be implemented in many US states, allowing for the indeterminate psychiatric commitment of sex offenders.
From the late 1920s American psychologist George E. Partridge influentially narrowed the definition of psychopathy to antisocial personality, and from 1930 suggested that a more apt name for it would be sociopathy. He suggested that anyone, and indeed groups of people acting together, could be considered sociopathic at times, but that sociopaths or technically 'essential sociopaths' - were chronically and pervasively so in their motivation and behavior. In 1933, American Psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan first coined the term "Psychopathic child," which is now thought to be the first formulation of autism spectrum disorder, to describe interpersonal deficiency which starts from childhood. Scottish psychiatrist David Henderson published in 1939 a theory of "psychopathic states" which, although he described different types and unusually suggested that psychopaths might not all be criminals, included a violently antisocial type which ended up contributing to that being the popular meaning of the term. In the 1940s a diagnosis of autistic psychopathy was introduced, later coming to wider notice and renamed Asperger syndrome to avoid the stigma of the term psychopathy.

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== Mid-20th century ==
The Mask of Sanity by American psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley, first published in 1941 and with revised editions for several decades, is considered a seminal work which provided a vivid series of case studies of individuals described as psychopaths. Cleckley proposed 16 characteristics of psychopathy, derived mainly from his work with male psychiatric patients in a locked institution. The title refers to the "mask" of normal functioning that Cleckley thought concealed the disorganization, amorality and disorder of the psychopathic personality. This marked the start in America of the current clinical and popularist conception of psychopathy as a particular type of antisocial, emotionless and criminal character. Cleckley would produce five editions of the book over subsequent decades, including a substantial revision in 1950, expanding his case studies and theories to more non-prisoners and non-criminals.
In Nazi Germany, especially during World War II, psychiatrists and others in programmes such as Action T4 and Action 14f13 systematically deported, sterilised, interned and euthanised patients and prisoners who could be classed as mentally ill, feebleminded, psychopathic, criminally insane or just asocial. In the aftermath of the war, therefore, concepts of antisocial psychopathic personalities fell out of favour in Europe to some extent. At the same time, however, in America and other countries the concept became increasingly prominent, used to categorise allied soldiers as fit or unfit for duty or on return to society, or, conversely, in the more specific sinister sense of the term, as a way to explain the actions of Nazis.
The first version of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1952 did not use the term psychopathy as a diagnosis, but "sociopathic personality disturbance". Individuals to be placed in this category were said to be "...ill primarily in terms of society and of conformity with the prevailing milieu, and not only in terms of personal discomfort and relations with other individuals". There were four subtypes (called 'reactions' after Adolf Meyer): antisocial, dyssocial, sexual and addiction. The antisocial reaction was said to include "individuals who are chronically in trouble and do not seem to change as a result of experience or punishment, with no loyalties to anyone", as well as being frequently callous and lacking responsibility, with an ability to 'rationalize' their behaviour. The dyssocial reaction was for "individuals who disregard societal rules, although they are capable of strong loyalties to others or groups." Although the sociopathy category was very broad by today's definitions, the DSM-I itself pointed out that it was more specific and limited than the then current notions of 'constitutional psychopathic state' or 'psychopathic personality'.
Meanwhile, other subtypes of psychopathy were sometimes proposed, notably by psychoanalyst Benjamin Karpman from the 1940s. He described psychopathy due to psychological problems (e.g. psychotic, hysterical or neurotic conditions) and idiopathic psychopathy where there was no obvious psychological cause, concluding that the former could not be attributed to a psychopathic personality and that the latter appeared so absent of any redeeming features that it couldn't be seen as a personality issue either but must be a constitutional "anethopathy" (amorality or antipathy). Various theories of distinctions between primary and secondary psychopathy remain to this day.
Cleckley's concept of psychopathy as expanded on in new editions of his book, particularly the sense of a conscience-less man beneath a mask of normality, caught the public imagination around this time. It also became increasingly influential in psychiatric circles. It later fell out of favor for some time, however, such that when he died in 1984 he was better remembered for a vivid case study of a female patient published in 1956, turned into a movie The Three Faces of Eve in 1957, which had (re)popularized in America another controversial diagnosis, multiple personality disorder.
A sociologist reviewing the field in 1958 wrote that "Without exception, on every point regarding psychopathic personality, psychiatrists present varying or contradictory views."
Nevertheless, criminologist sociologists William and Joan McCord were influential in narrowing the definition of psychopathy in some quarters to mean an antisocial lack of guilt accompanied by reactive aggression. From another direction, sociologist Lee Robins was also an influential figure in sociopathy research, stemming largely from her research-based 1966 book 'Deviant Children Grown Up: a sociological and psychiatric study of sociopathic personality', based on operational criteria provided by Eli Robins, which would shape the later diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder.
In the Mental Health Act in England, a new category of 'Psychopathic Personality' was added in 1959, renamed Psychopathic Disorder in 1983 (then in 2007 removed entirely). This was a legal subcategory in addition to 'mental illness' which did not equate to any one psychiatric diagnosis but covered anyone with "a persistent disorder or disability of mind which results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct."
On the other hand, various analysts began to identify "successful" psychopaths in society, some even suggesting it was but an adaption to the social or economic mores of the age, others noting they could be hard to spot either because they were so good at hiding their lack of conscience, or because many people showed the traits to some degree.

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== Late 20th century ==
In 1968 the second edition of the DSM, in place of the antisocial subtype of sociopathic personality disturbance, listed "antisocial personality" as one of ten personality disorders. This was still described in similar terms as the DSM-I's category, for individuals who are "basically unsocialized", in repeated conflicts with society, incapable of significant loyalty, selfish, irresponsible, unable to feel guilt or learn from prior experiences, and tend to blame others and rationalise. It warned that a history of legal or social offenses was not by itself enough to justify the diagnosis and that a 'group delinquent reaction' of childhood or adolescence or 'social maladjustment without manifest psychiatric disorder' should be ruled out first. The dyssocial type from the DSM-I was relegated, though would resurface as the main diagnosis in the ICD manual of the World Health Organization.
In 1974 (and republished in 1984) clinical psychologist Bobby E. Wright wrote about 'The Psychopathic Racial Personality', in which he suggested that negative aspects of the overall behavior of white peoples towards non-white peoples could be understood by seeing the former as displaying psychopathic traits involving predatory behavior and senseless destruction combined with ability to persuade.
There remained no international clinical agreement on the diagnosis of psychopathy. A 1977 study found little relationship with the characteristics commonly attributed to psychopaths and concluded that the concept was being used too widely and loosely. Robert D. Hare had published a book in 1970 summarizing research on psychopathy, and was subsequently at the forefront of psychopathy research. Frustrated by a lack of agreed definitions or rating systems for psychopathy, including at a ten-day international North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) conference in 1975, Hare began developing a Psychopathy Checklist. Produced for initial circulation in 1980, it was based largely on the list of traits advanced by Cleckley and partly on the theories of other authors and on his own experiences with clients in prisons. Meanwhile, a DSM-III task force instead developed the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, based on 1972 Feighner Criteria for research and published in the DSM in 1980. This was based on some of the criteria put forward by Cleckley but operationalized in behavioral rather than personality terms, more specifically related to conduct. APA was most concerned to demonstrate inter-rater reliability rather than necessarily validity.
Nevertheless, one author referred to the concept of psychopathy in 1987 as an "infinitely elastic, catch-all category". In 1988, psychologist Blackburn wrote in the British Journal of Psychiatry that as commonly used in psychiatry it is little more than a moral judgment masquerading as a clinical diagnosis, and should be scrapped. Ellard argued similarly in the same year in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, describing the concept as 'a reflection of the customs and prejudices of a particular social group. Most psychiatrists are from that group and therefore fail to see the incongruity.' By the 1970s and 80s the sexual psychopath laws were falling out of favor in many states; the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry called them a failure based on a confusing label mixing law and psychiatry.
Hare redrafted his checklist in 1985 (Cleckley had died in 1984), renaming it the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised and finalising it as a first edition in 1991, updated with extra data in a 2nd edition in 2003. Hare's list differed from Cleckley's not just in rewordings and introducing quantitative scores for each point. Cleckley had required an absence of delusions and an absence of nervousness, which was central to how he defined psychopathy, whereas neither were mentioned in Hare's list. Hare also left out mention of suicidality being rarely completed and behavior with alcohol. Moreover, while Cleckley only listed "inadequately motivated antisocial behavior", Hare turned this into an array of specific antisocial behaviors covering a person's whole life, including juvenile delinquency, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioural controls, and criminal versatility. Blackburn has noted that overall Hare's checklist is closer to the criminological concept of the McCords than that of Cleckley. Hare himself, while noting his promotion of Cleckley's work for four decades, would subsequently distance himself from it to some extent.
Meanwhile, following some criticism over the lack of psychological criteria in the DSM, further studies were conducted leading up the DSM-IV in 1994 and some personality criteria were included as "associated features" which were outlined in the text. The World Health Organization's ICD incorporated a similar diagnosis of Dissocial Personality Disorder. Both state that psychopathy (or sociopathy) may be considered synonyms of their diagnosis.
Hare wrote two bestsellers on psychopathy, "Without Conscience" in 1993 and "Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work" (co-written with organisational psychologist Paul Babiak, who was listed as first author) in 2006. Cleckley had described psychopathic patients as "carr[ying] disaster lightly in each hand" and "not deeply vicious", but Hare presented a more malevolent picture; the "mask of sanity" had acquired a more sinister meaning.
== 21st century ==
In 2002 an academic dispute arose around claims and counterclaims of racism in the use of the concept of psychopathy. British psychologist Richard Lynn claimed that some races were inherently more psychopathic than others, while other psychologists criticized his data and interpretations.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's monthly outreach and communication bulletin focused on psychopathy in June 2012, featuring articles introduced and co-authored by the main contemporary proponent of the construct, Robert D. Hare.
The DSM-5 published in 2013 had criteria for an overall diagnosis of Antisocial (Dissocial) Personality Disorder similar to DSM-IV, still noting that it has also been known as psychopathy or sociopathy. In an 'alternative model' suggested at the end of the manual, there is an optional specifier for "psychopathic features" - where there is a lack of anxiety/fear accompanied by a bold and efficacious interpersonal style.

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== Overall trends ==
One exhaustive analysis by a Canadian psychologist describes the various lines of work as 'a psychopathy project' attempting to establish psychopathy as an object of science. Overall this was found to have suffered from 'a number of serious logical confusions and deliberate mischaracterizations of its scientific merits' - including its early basis in degeneration theory, tautological definitions and associated neuroscience findings, routinely unclarified assumptions and shifting levels of explanation about the core concept, and exaggerated statistical claims such as based on Hare's use of factor analysis. It was noted, however, that some of the limited research findings may prove useful in a better explanatory framework (i.e. not necessarily under the umbrella of 'psychopathy').
Swedish sociologist Roland Paulsen has further placed the more recent resurgence in popular coverage of psychopathy in the context of "the Enlightenment project" to use rationality and technology to deal with problems in human life and society. A Scottish sociologist of biomedical ethics has suggested that the DSM's attempt to develop different standards for Antisocial Personality Disorder have been limited and modified by path dependence on the concept of psychopathy/sociopathy, due to the latter being embedded in diverse sociotechnological networks and thereby demanded by various users.
== See also ==
History of mental disorders
== References ==

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Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged, primarily out of Enlightenment thought, as a positivist science of society shortly after the French Revolution. Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge, arising in reaction to such issues as modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization and imperialism.
During its nascent stages, within the late 19th century, sociological deliberations took particular interest in the emergence of the modern nation state, including its constituent institutions, units of socialization, and its means of surveillance. As such, an emphasis on the concept of modernity, rather than the Enlightenment, often distinguishes sociological discourse from that of classical political philosophy. Likewise, social analysis in a broader sense has origins in the common stock of philosophy, therefore pre-dating the sociological field.
Various quantitative social research techniques have become common tools for governments, businesses, and organizations, and have also found use in the other social sciences. Divorced from theoretical explanations of social dynamics, this has given social research a degree of autonomy from the discipline of sociology. Similarly, "social science" has come to be appropriated as an umbrella term to refer to various disciplines which study humans, interaction, society or culture.
As a discipline, sociology encompasses a varying scope of conception based on each sociologist's understanding of the nature and scope of society and its constituents. Creating a merely linear definition of its science would be improper in rationalizing the aims and efforts of sociological study from different academic backgrounds.
== Antecedent history ==
=== Scope of being "sociological" ===
The codification of sociology as a word, concept, and popular terminology is identified with Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (see 18th century section) and succeeding figures from that point onward. It is important to be mindful of presentism, of introducing ideas of the present into the past, around sociology. Below, we see figures that developed strong methods and critiques that reflect on what we know sociology to be today that situates them as important figures in knowledge development around sociology. However, the term of "sociology" did not exist in this period, requiring careful language to incorporate these earlier efforts into the wider history of sociology. A more apt term to use might be proto-sociology that outlines that the rough ingredients of sociology were present, but had no defined shape or label to understand them as sociology as we concepualize it today.
=== Ancient Greeks ===
Sociological reasoning may be traced back at least as far as the ancient Greeks, whose characteristic trends in sociological thought can be traced back to their social environment. Given the rarity of extensive or highly-centralized political organization within states, the tribal spirit of localism and provincialism was in open season for deliberations on social phenomena, which would thus pervade much of Greek thought.
Proto-sociological observations can be seen in the founding texts of Western philosophy (e.g. Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Polybius, etc.). Similarly, the methodological survey can trace its origins back to the Domesday Book ordered by King of England, William the Conqueror, in 1086.
=== 13th century: studying social patterns ===
==== East Asia ====
Sociological perspectives can also be found among non-European thought of figures such as Confucius.
In the 13th century, Ma Duanlin, a Chinese historian, first recognized patterns of social dynamics as an underlying component of historical development in his seminal encyclopedia, Wénxiàn Tōngkǎo (文献通考; 'General Study of Literary Remains').
=== 14th century: early studies of social conflict and change ===
==== North Africa ====
There is evidence of early Muslim sociology from the 14th century. In particular, some consider Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Arab from Tunisia, to have been the first sociologist and, thus, the father of sociology. His Muqaddimah (later translated as Prolegomena in Latin), serving as an introduction to a seven-volume analysis of universal history, would perhaps be the first work to advance social-scientific reasoning and social philosophy in formulating theories of social cohesion and social conflict.
Concerning the discipline of sociology,Ibn Khaldun conceived a dynamic theory of history that involved conceptualizations of social conflict and social change. He developed the dichotomy of sedentary life versus nomadic life, as well as the concept of generation, and the inevitable loss of power that occurs when desert warriors conquer a city. Following his Syrian contemporary, Sati' al-Husri, the Muqaddimah may be read as a sociological work; six books of general sociology, to be specific. Topics dealt with in this work include politics, urban life, economics, and knowledge.
The work is based around Khaldun's central concept of asabiyyah, meaning "social cohesion", "group solidarity", or "tribalism". Khaldun suggests such cohesion arises spontaneously amongst tribes and other small kinship groups, which can then be intensified and enlarged through religious ideology. Khaldun's analysis observes how this cohesion carries groups to power while simultaneously containing within itself the—psychological, sociological, economic, political—seeds of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty, or empire bound by an even stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion.
== 18th century: European modern origins of sociology ==
French politician and philosopher Louis de Bonald (2 October 1754 23 November 1840) formulated a theoretical framework that would give rise to French sociology.
The term "sociologie" was first coined by the French Roman Catholic priest and essayist Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (17731799), derived the Latin socius, 'companion'; joined with the suffix -ology, 'the study of', itself from the Greek lógos (λόγος, 'knowledge').
== 19th century: defining sociology ==
In 1838, the French scholar Auguste Comte ultimately gave sociology the definition that it holds today. Comte had earlier expressed his work as "social physics", however that term would be appropriated by others such as Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet.
=== European sociology: The Enlightenment and positivism ===

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==== Henri de Saint-Simon ====
Henri de Saint-Simon published Physiologie sociale in 1813, devoting much of his time to the prospect that human society could be steered toward progress if scientists would form an international assembly to influence its course. He argued that scientists could distract groups from war and strife, by focusing their attention to generally improving their societies living conditions. In turn, this would bring multiple cultures and societies together and prevent conflict. Saint-Simon took the idea that everyone had encouraged from the Enlightenment, which was the belief in science, and spun it to be more practical and hands-on for the society.
Saint-Simon's main idea was that industrialism would create a new launch in history. He saw that people had been seeing progress as an approach for science, but he wanted them to see it as an approach to all aspects of life. Society was making a crucial change at the time since it was growing out of a declining feudalism. This new path could provide the basis for solving all the old problems society had previously encountered. He was more concerned with the participation of man in the workforce instead of which workforce man choose. His slogan became "All men must work", to which communism would add and supply its own slogan "Each according to his capacity."
==== Auguste Comte and followers ====
Writing after the original Enlightenment and influenced by the work of Saint-Simon, political philosopher of social contract, Auguste Comte hoped to unify all studies of humankind through the scientific understanding of the social realm. His own sociological scheme was typical of the 19th-century humanists; he believed all human life passed through distinct historical stages and that, if one could grasp this progress, one could prescribe the remedies for social ills. Sociology was to be the "queen science" in Comte's schema; all basic physical sciences had to arrive first, leading to the most fundamentally difficult science of human society itself. Comte has thus come to be viewed as the "Father of Sociology".
Comte delineated his broader philosophy of science in the Course of Positive Philosophy (c. 18301842), whereas his A General View of Positivism (1848) emphasized the particular goals of sociology. Comte would be so impressed with his theory of positivism that he referred to it as "the great discovery of the year 1822."
Comte's system is based on the principles of knowledge as seen in three states. This law asserts that any kind of knowledge always begins in theological form. Here, the knowledge can be explained by a superior supernatural power such as animism, spirits, or gods. It then passes to the metaphysical form, where the knowledge is explained by abstract philosophical speculation. Finally, the knowledge becomes positive after being explained scientifically through observation, experimentation, and comparison. The order of the laws was created in order of increasing difficulty. Comte's description of the development of society is parallel to Karl Marx's own theory of historiography from capitalism to communism. The two would both be influenced by various Utopian-socialist thinkers of the day, agreeing that some form of communism would be the climax of societal development.
In later life, Auguste Comte developed a "religion of humanity" to give positivist societies the unity and cohesiveness found through the traditional worship people were used to. In this new "religion", Comte referred to society as the "Great Being" and would promote a universal love and harmony taught through the teachings of his industrial system theory. For his close associate, John Stuart Mill, it was possible to distinguish between a "good Comte" (the one who wrote Course in Positive Philosophy) and a "bad Comte" (the author of the secular-religious system). The system would be unsuccessful but met with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species to influence the proliferation of various secular humanist organizations in the 19th century, especially through the work of secularists such as George Holyoake and Richard Congreve.
Harriet Martineau undertook an English translation of Cours de Philosophie Positive that was published in two volumes in 1853 as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau). Comte recommended her volumes to his students instead of his own. Some writers regard Martineau as the first female sociologist. Her introduction of Comte to the English-speaking world and the elements of sociological perspective in her original writings support her credit as a sociologist.
==== Marx and historical materialism ====
Both Comte and Marx intended to develop a new scientific ideology in the wake of European secularization. Marx, in the tradition of Hegelianism, rejected the positivist method and was in turn rejected by the self-proclaimed sociologists of his day. However, in attempting to develop a comprehensive science of society Marx nevertheless became recognized as a founder of sociology by the mid 20th century. Isaiah Berlin described Marx as the "true father" of modern sociology, "in so far as anyone can claim the title."

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== 21st century sociology ==
The increase in the size of data sets produced by the new survey methods was followed by the invention of new statistical techniques for analyzing this data. Analysis of this sort is usually performed with statistical software packages such as R, SAS, Stata, or SPSS.
Social network analysis is an example of a new paradigm in the positivist tradition. The influence of social network analysis is pervasive in many sociological sub fields such as economic sociology (see the work of J. Clyde Mitchell, Harrison White, or Mark Granovetter, for example), organizational behavior, historical sociology, political sociology, or the sociology of education. There is also a minor revival of a more independent, empirical sociology in the spirit of C. Wright Mills, and his studies of the Power Elite in the United States of America, according to Stanley Aronowitz.
Critical realism is a philosophical approach to understanding science developed by Roy Bhaskar (19442014). It combines a general philosophy of science (transcendental realism) with a philosophy of social science (critical naturalism). It specifically opposes forms of empiricism and positivism by viewing science as concerned with identifying causal mechanisms. Also, in the context of social science it argues that scientific investigation can lead directly to critique of social arrangements and institutions, in a similar manner to the work of Karl Marx. In the last decades of the twentieth century it also stood against various forms of 'postmodernism'. It is one of a range of types of philosophical realism, as well as forms of realism advocated within social science such as analytic realism and subtle realism.
== See also ==
Bibliography of sociology
List of sociologists
Outline of sociology
Subfields of sociology
Timeline of sociology
Philosophy of social science
== Notes ==
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Coser, Lewis A. (1976). "Sociological Theory From the Chicago Dominance to 1965". Annual Review of Sociology. 2: 145160.
Gerhard Lenski. 1982. Human societies: An introduction to macrosociology, McGraw Hill Company.
Nash, Kate. 2010. Contemporary Political Sociology: Globalization, Politics, and Power. Wiley-Blackwell Publishers.
Samuel William Bloom, The Word as Scalpel: A History of Medical Sociology, Oxford University Press 2002
Raymond Boudon A Critical Dictionary of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989
Craig Calhoun, ed. Sociology in America. The ASA Centennial History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Deegan, Mary Jo, ed. Women in Sociology: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
A. H. Halsey, A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature, and Society, Oxford University Press 2004
Martindale, Don (1976). "American Sociology Before World War II". Annual Review of Sociology. 2: 121143.
Barbara Laslett (editor), Barrie Thorne (editor), Feminist Sociology: Life Histories of a Movement, Rutgers University Press 1997
Levine, Donald N. (1995). Visions of the Sociological Tradition. University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-47547-9.
Moebius, Stephan: Sociology in Germany. A History, Palgrave Macmillan 2021 (open access), ISBN 978-3-030-71866-4.
T.N. Madan, Pathways : approaches to the study of society in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994
Sorokin, Pitirim. Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928) online free guide to major scholars
Guglielmo Rinzivillo, A Modern History of Sociology in Italy and the Various Patterns of its Epistemological Development, New York, Nova Science Publishers, 2019
Sorokin, Pitirim and Carle C Zimmerman. Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology (3 vol 1927) online free
Steinmetz, George. 'Neo-Bourdieusian Theory and the Question of Scientific Autonomy: German Sociologists and Empire, 1890s1940s', Political Power and Social Theory Volume 20 (2009): 71131.
Wiggershaus, Rolf (1994). The Frankfurt School : its history, theories and political significance. Polity Press. ISBN 978-0-7456-0534-0.
Kon, Igor, ed. (1989). A History of Classical Sociology (DOC, DjVu, etc.). Translated by H. Campbell Creighton. Moscow: Progress Publishers. ISBN 978-5-01-001102-4.

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To have given clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical questions which most occupied men's minds at the time, and to have deduced from them clear practical directives without creating obviously artificial links between the two, was the principal achievement of Marx's theory.… The sociological treatment of historical and moral problems, which Comte and after him, Spencer and Taine, had discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of militant Marxism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense.
In the 1830s, Karl Marx was part of the Young Hegelians in Berlin, which discussed and wrote about the legacy of the philosopher, George W. F. Hegel (whose seminal tome, Science of Logic was published in 1816). Although, at first sympathetic with the group's strategy of attacking Christianity to undermine the Prussian establishment, he later formed divergent ideas and broke with the Young Hegelians, attacking their views in works such as The German Ideology. Witnessing the struggles of the laborers during the Industrial Revolution, Marx concluded that religion (or the "ideal") is not the basis of the establishment's power, but rather ownership of capital (or the "material")- processes that employ technologies, land, money and especially human labor-power to create surplus-value—lie at the heart of the establishment's power. This "stood Hegel on his head" as he theorized that, at its core, the engine of history and the structure of society was fundamentally material rather than ideal. He theorized that both the realm of cultural production and political power created ideologies that perpetuated the oppression of the working class and the concentration of wealth within the capitalist class: the owners of the means of production. Marx predicted that the capitalist class would feel compelled to reduce wages or replace laborers with technology, which would ultimately increase wealth among the capitalists. However, as the workers were also the primary consumers of the goods produced, reducing their wages would result in an inevitable collapse in capitalism as a mode of economic production.
Marx also co-operated with Friedrich Engels, who accused the capitalist class of "social murder" for causing workers "life of toil and wretchedness" but with a response that "tales no further trouble in the matter". This gives them the power over the workers' health and income, "which can degree his life or death". His book The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) studied the life of the proletariat in Manchester, London, Dublin, and Edinburgh.
==== Durkheim and French sociology ====
Émile Durkheim's work had importance as he was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. Durkheim's first major sociological work was The Division of Labour in Society (1893). In 1895, he published The Rules of Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology at what became in 1896 the University of Bordeaux, where he taught from 1887 to 1902; he became France's first professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies. Durkheim was deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions, if this term is understood in its broader meaning as "beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity" and its aim was to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic; that is, sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals. He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon.
==== German sociology: Tönnies, the Webers, Simmel ====

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Ferdinand Tönnies argued that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft were the two normal types of human association. The former was the traditional kind of community with strong social bonds and shared beliefs, while the latter was the modern society in which individualism and rationality had become more dominant. He also drew a sharp line between the realm of conceptuality and the reality of social action: the first must be treated axiomatically and in a deductive way ('pure' sociology), whereas the second empirically and in an inductive way ('applied' sociology). His ideas were further developed by Max Weber, another early German sociologist.
Weber argued for the study of social action through interpretive (rather than purely empiricist) means, based on understanding the purpose and meaning that individuals attach to their own actions. Unlike Durkheim, he did not believe in monocausal explanations and rather proposed that for any outcome there can be multiple causes. Weber's main intellectual concern was understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularisation, and "disenchantment", which he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity. Weber is also known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, elaborated in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he proposed that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities" associated with the rise in the Western world of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state. He argued that it was in the basic tenets of Protestantism to boost capitalism. Thus, it can be said that the spirit of capitalism is inherent to Protestant religious values. Against Marx's historical materialism, Weber emphasised the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism. The Protestant Ethic formed the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion. In another major work, "Politics as a Vocation", Weber defined the state as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". He was also the first to categorise social authority into distinct forms, which he labelled as charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. His analysis of bureaucracy emphasised that modern state institutions are increasingly based on rational-legal authority.
Weber´s wife, Marianne Weber also became a sociologist in her own right writing about women´s issues. She wrote Wife and Mother in the Development of Law which was devoted to the analysis of the institution of marriage. Her conclusion was that marriage is "a complex and ongoing negotiation over power and intimacy, in which money, women's work, and sexuality are key issues". Another theme in her work was that women's work could be used to "map and explain the construction and reproduction of the social person and the social world". Human work creates cultural products ranging from small, daily values such as cleanliness and honesty to larger, more abstract phenomena like philosophy and language.
Georg Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?', presenting pioneering analyses of social individuality and fragmentation. For Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history". Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomena in terms of "forms" and "contents" with a transient relationship; form becoming content, and vice versa, dependent on the context. In this sense he was a forerunner to structuralist styles of reasoning in the social sciences. With his work on the metropolis, Simmel was a precursor of urban sociology, symbolic interactionism and social network analysis. Simmel's most famous works today are The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892), The Philosophy of Money (1900), The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Soziologie (1908, inc. The Stranger, The Social Boundary, The Sociology of the Senses, The Sociology of Space, and On The Spatial Projections of Social Forms), and Fundamental Questions of Sociology (1917).
==== Herbert Spencer ====

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Herbert Spencer (18201903), the English philosopher, was one of the most popular and influential 19th-century sociologists, although his work has largely fallen out of favor in contemporary sociology. The early sociology of Spencer came about broadly as a reaction to Comte and Marx; writing before and after the Darwinian revolution in biology, Spencer attempted to reformulate the discipline in socially Darwinistic terms. In fact, his early writings show a coherent theory of general evolution several years before Darwin published anything on the subject.
Encouraged by his friend and follower Edward L. Youmans, Spencer published The Study of Sociology in 1874, which was the first book with the term "sociology" in the title. It is estimated that he sold one million books in his lifetime, far more than any other sociologist at the time. So strong was his influence that many other 19th-century thinkers, including Émile Durkheim, defined their ideas in relation to his. Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society is to a large extent an extended debate with Spencer from whose sociology Durkheim borrowed extensively. Also a notable biologist, Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" as a basic mechanism by which more effective socio-cultural forms progressed. This means that the strongest members of society should not help the weaker members of society. An example is that the richest should remain rich and the poor should also remain poor, as the rich people would not help the poor.
In the 20th century, Spencer's work became less influential in sociology because of his social Darwinist views on race, which are widely considered a form of scientific racism. For example, in his Social Statics (1850), he argued that imperialism had served civilization by clearing the inferior races off the earth: "The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way. … Be he human or be he brute the hindrance must be got rid of." Largely because of his work on race, Spencer is now described in the academy as "of all the great Victorian thinkers... [the one] whose reputation has fallen the farthest."
=== North American sociology ===
==== Lester Frank Ward ====
A contemporary of Spencer, Lester Frank Ward is often described as a father of American sociology and served as the first president of the American Sociological Association in 1905 and served as such until 1907. He published Dynamic Sociology in 1883; Outlines of Sociology in 1898; Pure Sociology in 1903; and Applied Sociology in 1906. Also in 1906, at the age of 65 he was appointed as professor of sociology at Brown University.
==== W. E. B. Du Bois ====
In July 1897, W. E. B. Du Bois produced his first major The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a detailed and comprehensive sociological study of the African-American people of Philadelphia, based on the field work he did in 18961897. The work was a breakthrough in scholarship because it was the first scientific study of African Americans and a significant contribution to early scientific sociology in the U.S. In the study, Du Bois coined the phrase "the submerged tenth" to describe the black underclass. Later in 1903 he popularized the term, the "Talented Tenth", applied to society's elite class. Du Bois's terminology reflected his opinion that the elite of a nation, both black and white, were critical to achievements in culture and progress. To portray the genius and humanity of the black race, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of 14 essays. The introduction famously proclaimed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." A major theme of the work was the double consciousness faced by African Americans: being both American and black. This was a unique identity which, according to Du Bois, had been a handicap in the past, but could be a strength in the future, "Henceforth, the destiny of the race could be conceived as leading neither to assimilation nor separatism but to proud, enduring hyphenation."
=== Other precursors ===
Many other philosophers and academics were influential in the development of sociology, not least the Enlightenment theorists of social contract, and historians such as Adam Ferguson (17231816). For his theory on social interaction, Ferguson has himself been described as "the father" of modern sociology. Ferguson argued that capitalism was diminishing social bonds that traditionally held communities together. Other early works to appropriate the term 'sociology' included A Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical by the North American lawyer Henry Hughes and Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society by the American lawyer George Fitzhugh. Both books were published in 1854, in the context of the debate over slavery in the antebellum US. Harriet Martineau, a Whig social theorist and the English translator of many of Comte's works, has been cited as the first female sociologist. Writing a study of the United States, she noted how the theoretical ideal of equality apparent in the Declaration of Independence were not reflected in the social reality of the country, which marginalised women and practiced slavery.
Various other early social historians and economists have gained recognition as classical sociologists, including Robert Michels (18761936), Alexis de Tocqueville (18051859), Vilfredo Pareto (18481923) and Thorstein Veblen (18571926). The classical sociological texts broadly differ from political philosophy in the attempt to remain scientific, systematic, structural, or dialectical, rather than purely moral, normative or subjective. The new class relations associated with the development of Capitalism are also key, further distinguishing sociological texts from the political philosophy of the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras.
== 19th century: institutionalization ==
=== Rise as an academic discipline ===

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==== Europe ====
Formal institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline began when Emile Durkheim founded the first French department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895. In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique.
A course entitled "sociology" was taught for the first time in the United States in 1875 by William Graham Sumner, drawing upon the thought of Comte and Herbert Spencer rather than the work of Durkheim. In 1890, the oldest continuing sociology course in the United States began at the University of Kansas, lectured by Frank Blackmar. The Department of History and Sociology at the University of Kansas was established in 1891 and the first full-fledged independent university department of sociology was established in 1892 at the University of Chicago by Albion W. Small (18541926), who in 1895 founded the American Journal of Sociology. American sociology arose on a broadly independent trajectory to European sociology. George Herbert Mead and Charles H. Cooley were influential in the development of symbolic interactionism and social psychology at the University of Chicago, while Lester Ward emphasized the central importance of the scientific method with the publication of Dynamic Sociology in 1883.
The first sociology department in the United Kingdom was founded at the London School of Economics in 1904. In 1919 a sociology department was established in Germany at LMU Munich by Max Weber, who had established a new antipositivist sociology. The "Institute for Social Research" at the University of Frankfurt (later to become the "Frankfurt School" of critical theory) was founded in 1923.[29] Critical theory would take on something of a life of its own after WW2, influencing literary theory and the "Birmingham School" of cultural studies.
The University of Frankfurt's advances along with the proximity to the research institute for sociology made Germany a powerful force in leading sociology at that time. In 1918, Frankfurt received the funding to create sociology's first department chair. The Germany's groundbreaking work influenced its government to add the position of Minister of Culture to advance the country as a whole. The remarkable collection of men who were contributing to the sociology department at Frankfurt were soon getting worldwide attention and began being referred to as the "Frankfurt school." Here they studied new perspectives on Marx' theories, and went into depth in the works of Weber and Freud. Most of these men would soon be forced out of Germany by the Nazis, moving to America. In the United States they had a significant influence on social research. This forced relocation of sociologists enabled sociology in America to rise up to the standards of European studies of sociology by planting some of Europe's greatest sociologists in America.
Felix Weil was one of the students who received their doctorate on the concept of socialization from the University of Frankfurt. He, along with Max Horkheimer and Kurt Albert Gerlach, developed the Institute of Social Research after it was established in 1923. Kurt Albert Gerlach would serve as the institute's first director. Their goal in creating the institute was to produce a place that people could discover and be informed of social life as a whole. Weil, Horkheimer, and Gerlach wanted to focus on interactions between economics, politics, legal matters, as well as scholarly interactions in the community and society. The main research that got the institute known was its revival of scientific Marxism. Many benefactors contributed money, supplies, and buildings to keep this area of research going. When Gerlach became ill and had to step down as director, Max Horkheimer took his place. He encouraged the students of the institute to question everything they studied. If the students studied a theory, he not only wanted them to discover its truth themselves, but also to discover how, and why it is true and the theories relation to society. The National Socialist regime exiled many of the members of the Institute of Social Research. The regime also forced many students and staff from the entire Frankfurt University, and most fled to America. The war meant that the institute lost too many people and was forced to close. In 1950, the institute was reopened as a private establishment. From this point on the Institute of Social Research would have a close connection to sociology studies in the United States.
==== North America ====

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In 1905 the American Sociological Association, the world's largest association of professional sociologists, was founded, and Lester F. Ward was selected to serve as the first President of the new society.
The University of Chicago developed the major sociologists at the time. It brought them together, and even gave them a hub and a network to link all the leading sociologists. In 1925, a third of all sociology graduate students attended the University of Chicago. Chicago was very good at not isolating their students from other schools. They encouraged them to blend with other sociologists, and to not spend more time in the class room than studying the society around them. This would teach them real life application of the classroom teachings. The first teachings at the University of Chicago were focused on the social problems that the world had been dealt. At this time, academia was not concerned with theory; especially not to the point that academia is today. Many people were still hesitant of sociology at this time, especially with the recent controversial theories of Weber and Marx. The University of Chicago decided to go into an entirely different direction and their sociology department directed their attention to the individual and promoted equal rights. Their concentration was small groups and discoveries of the individual's relationship to society. The program combined with other departments to offer students well-rounded studies requiring courses in hegemony, economics, psychology, multiple social sciences and political science. Albion Small was the head of the sociology program at the University of Chicago. He played a key role in bringing German sociological advancements directly into American academic sociology. Small also created the American Journal of Sociology. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess refined the program's methods, guidelines, and checkpoints. This made the findings more standardized, concise and easier to comprehend. The pair even wrote the sociology program's textbook for a reference and get all students on the same page more effectively. Many remarkable sociologists such as George Hebert Mead, W.E.B Du Bois, Robert Park, Charles S. Johnson, William Ogburn, Hebert Blumer and many others have significant ties to the University of Chicago.
In 1920 a department was set up in Poland by Florian Znaniecki (18821958). William I. Thomas was an early graduate from the Sociology Department of the University of Chicago. He built upon his education and his work changed sociology in many ways. In 1918, William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki gave the world the publication of "The Polish Peasant" in Europe and America. This publication combined sociological theory with in depth experiential research and thus launching methodical sociological research as a whole. This changed sociologist's methods and enabled them to see new patterns and connect new theories. This publication also gave sociologists a new way to found their research and prove it on a new level. All their research would be more solid, and harder for society to not pay attention to it. In 1920, Znaniecki developed a sociology department in Poland to expand research and teachings there.
With the lack of sociological theory being taught at the University of Chicago paired with the new foundations of statistical methods, the student's ability to make any real predictions was nonexistent. This was a major factor in the downfall of the Chicago school.
==== International ====
International cooperation in sociology began in 1893 when René Worms (18691926) founded the small Institut International de Sociologie, eclipsed by much larger International Sociological Association from 1949.
=== Canonization of Durkheim, Marx and Weber ===
Durkheim, Marx, and Weber are typically cited as the three principal architects of modern social science. The sociological "canon of classics" with Durkheim and Weber at the top owes in part to Talcott Parsons, who is largely credited with introducing both to American audiences. Parsons' Structure of Social Action (1937) consolidated the American sociological tradition and set the agenda for American sociology at the point of its fastest disciplinary growth. In Parsons' canon, however, Vilfredo Pareto holds greater significance than either Marx or Simmel. His canon was guided by a desire to "unify the divergent theoretical traditions in sociology behind a single theoretical scheme, one that could in fact be justified by purely scientific developments in the discipline during the previous half century." While the secondary role Marx plays in early American sociology may be attributed to Parsons, as well as to broader political trends, the dominance of Marxism in European sociological thought had long since secured the rank of Marx alongside Durkheim and Weber as one of the three "classical" sociologists.

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== 19th century: from positivism to anti-positivism ==
The methodological approach toward sociology by early theorists was to treat the discipline in broadly the same manner as natural science. An emphasis on empiricism and the scientific method was sought to provide an incontestable foundation for any sociological claims or findings, and to distinguish sociology from less empirical fields such as philosophy. This perspective, termed positivism, was first developed by theorist Auguste Comte. Positivism was founded on the theory that the only true, factual knowledge is scientific knowledge. Comte had very vigorous guidelines for a theory to be considered positivism. He thought that this authentic knowledge can only be derived from positive confirmation of theories through strict continuously tested methods, that are not only scientifically but also quantitatively based. Émile Durkheim was a major proponent of theoretically grounded empirical research, seeking correlations to reveal structural laws, or "social facts". Durkheim proved that concepts that had been attributed to the individual were actually socially determined. These occurrences are things such as suicide, crime, moral outrage, a person's personality, time, space, and God. He brought to light that society had influence on all aspects of a person, far more than had been previously believed. For him, sociology could be described as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning". Durkheim endeavoured to apply sociological findings in the pursuit of political reform and social solidarity. Today, scholarly accounts of Durkheim's positivism may be vulnerable to exaggeration and oversimplification: Comte was the only major sociological thinker to postulate that the social realm may be subject to scientific analysis in the same way as noble science, whereas Durkheim acknowledged in greater detail the fundamental epistemological limitations.
Reactions against positivism began when German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831) voiced opposition to both empiricism, which he rejected as uncritical, and determinism, which he viewed as overly mechanistic. Karl Marx's methodology borrowed from Hegel dialecticism but also a rejection of positivism in favour of critical analysis, seeking to supplement the empirical acquisition of "facts" with the elimination of illusions. He maintained that appearances need to be critiqued rather than simply documented. Marx nonetheless endeavoured to produce a science of society grounded in the economic determinism of historical materialism. Other philosophers, including Wilhelm Dilthey (18331911) and Heinrich Rickert (18631936) argued that the natural world differs from the social world because of those unique aspects of human society (meanings, signs, and so on) which inform human cultures.
In Italy, speculative knowledge prevails over positivistic sociological science, where the forms of attraction of the social sciences are vitiated by the self-reformism of morality and the self-assertion of science. The process lasts until the 1950s. After that there is a revival and sociological science gradually asserts itself as an academic discipline (See Guglielmo Rinzivillo, Science and the Object. Self-criticism of strategic knowledge, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2010, p. 52 ff., ISBN 9788856824872).
At the turn of the 20th century the first generation of German sociologists formally introduced methodological antipositivism, proposing that research should concentrate on human cultural norms, values, symbols, and social processes viewed from a subjective perspective. Max Weber argued that sociology may be loosely described as a 'science' as it is able to identify causal relationships—especially among ideal types, or hypothetical simplifications of complex social phenomena. As a nonpositivist however, one seeks relationships that are not as "ahistorical, invariant, or generalizable" as those pursued by natural scientists. Both Weber and Georg Simmel pioneered the Verstehen (or 'interpretative') approach toward social science; a systematic process in which an outside observer attempts to relate to a particular cultural group, or indigenous people, on their own terms and from their own point-of-view. Through the work of Simmel, in particular, sociology acquired a possible character beyond positivist data-collection or grand, deterministic systems of structural law. Relatively isolated from the sociological academy throughout his lifetime, Simmel presented idiosyncratic analyses of modernity more reminiscent of the phenomenological and existential writers than of Comte or Durkheim, paying particular concern to the forms of, and possibilities for, social individuality. His sociology engaged in a neo-Kantian critique of the limits of perception, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?'
== 20th century: functionalism, structuralism, critical theory and globalization ==
=== Early 20th century ===
In the early 20th century, sociology expanded in the U.S., including developments in both macrosociology, concerned with the evolution of societies, and microsociology, concerned with everyday human social interactions. Based on the pragmatic social psychology of George Herbert Mead (18631931), Herbert Blumer (19001987) and, later, the Chicago school, sociologists developed symbolic interactionism.
In the 1920s, György Lukács released History and Class Consciousness (1923), while a number of works by Durkheim and Weber were published posthumously. During the same period members of the Frankfurt school, such as Theodor W. Adorno (19031969) and Max Horkheimer (18951973), developed critical theory, integrating the historical materialistic elements of Marxism with the insights of Weber, Freud and Gramsci—in theory, if not always in name—often characterizing capitalist modernity as a move away from the central tenets of the Enlightenment.
In the 1930s, Talcott Parsons (19021979) aimed to bring together the various strands of sociology, with the aim of developing a universal methodology. He developed action theory and functionalism, integrating the study of social order with the structural and voluntaristic aspects of macro and micro factors, while placing the discussion within a higher explanatory context of system theory and cybernetics. Parsons had also suggested starting from the 'bottom up' rather than the 'top down' when researching social order. One of his students, Harold Garfinkel, followed in this direction, developing ethnomethodology. In Austria and later the U.S., Alfred Schütz (18991959) developed social phenomenology, which would later inform social constructionism.

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=== Mid 20th century ===
In some countries, sociology was undermined by totalitarian governments for reasons of ostensible political control. After the Russian Revolution, sociology was gradually "politicized, Bolshevisized and eventually, Stalinized" until it virtually ceased to exist in the Soviet Union. In China, the discipline was banned with semiotics, comparative linguistics and cybernetics as "Bourgeois pseudoscience" in 1952, not to return until 1979. During the same period, however, sociology was also undermined by conservative universities in the West. This was due, in part, to perceptions of the subject as possessing an inherent tendency, through its own aims and remit, toward liberal or left wing thought. Given that the subject was founded by structural functionalists; concerned with organic cohesion and social solidarity, this view was somewhat groundless (though it was Parsons who had introduced Durkheim to American audiences, and his interpretation has been criticized for a latent conservatism).
In the mid-20th century Robert K. Merton released his Social Theory and Social Structure (1949). Around the same time, C. Wright Mills continued Weber's work of understanding how modernity was undermining tradition, with a critique of the dehumanizing impact this had on people. Also using the Weberian notion of class, he found that the United States was at the time ruled by a power elite composed of military, political, economic and union leaders. His The Sociological Imagination (1959), argued that the problem was in people seeing their problems as individual issues, rather than as products of social processes. Also in 1959, Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and introduced the theory of dramaturgical analysis which asserts that all individuals aim to create a specific impression of themselves in the minds of other people.
Wright Mills' ideas were influential on the New Left of the 1960's, which he had also coined the name for. Herbert Marcuse was subsequently involved in the movement. Following the counterculture of the decade, new thinkers emerged, especially in France, such as Michel Foucault. While power had earlier been viewed either in political or economic terms, Foucault argued that "power is everywhere, and comes from everywhere", seeing it as a type of relation present on every level of society that is a key component of social order. Examples of such relations included discourse and power-knowledge. Foucault also studied human sexuality with his The History of Sexuality (1976). Influenced by him, Judith Butler subsequently pioneered queer theory. Raewyn Connell in turn identified the stigmatization of homosexuality as a product of hegemonic masculinity.
In the 1960's, sociologists also developed new types of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Paul Lazarsfeld founded Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, where he exerted a tremendous influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. His many contributions to sociological method have earned him the title of the "founder of modern empirical sociology". Lazarsfeld made great strides in statistical survey analysis, panel methods, latent structure analysis, and contextual analysis. He is also considered a co-founder of mathematical sociology. Many of his ideas have been so influential as to now be considered self-evident.
In the 1970's, Peter Townsend redefined poverty from the previous definition of 'total earnings being too little to obtain the minimum necessities of physical life', to one which also took into account the relative deprivation caused, meaning that not having access to the typical level of lifestyle was also a form of poverty. During the same decade, Pierre Bourdieu, advancing the concept of habitus, argued that class was not defined solely by economic means, but also by the socially acquired taste which one shared with the rest of the class. Beyond economic capital, he also identified cultural, social, scholastic, linguistic, and political capital. These all contributed towards symbolic capital. Richard Sennett in turn found that working-class people were finding themselves in crisis following rising social status, as it conflicted with the values of their background.
==== Structuralism ====
Structuralism is "the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure". Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 1900s, mainly in France and Russian Empire, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when structural linguistics were facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance, an array of scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their respective fields of study. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in structuralism.
==== Modernization theory ====
Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. Modernization refers to a model of a progressive transition from a 'pre-modern' or 'traditional' to a 'modern' society. Modernization theory originated from the ideas of German sociologist Max Weber (18641920), which provided the basis for the modernization paradigm developed by Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons (19021979). The theory looks at the internal factors of a country while assuming that with assistance, "traditional" countries can be brought to development in the same manner more developed countries have been. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, then went into a deep eclipse. It made a comeback after 1991 but remains a controversial model. Political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective becoming influential in modernization theories and in emerging political science.

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==== Dependency theory ====
In Latin America Dependency theory, a structuralist theory, emerged arguing that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the "world system". This theory was officially developed in the late 1960s following World War II, as scholars searched for the root issue in the lack of development in Latin America. The theory was popular in the 1960s and 1970s as a criticism of modernization theory, which was falling increasingly out of favor because of continued widespread poverty in much of the world. At that time the assumptions of liberal theories of development were under attack. It was used to explain the causes of overurbanization, a theory that urbanization rates outpaced industrial growth in several developing countries. Influenced by Dependency theory, World-systems theory emerged as a macro-scale approach to world history and social change which emphasizes the world-system (and not nation states) as the primary (but not exclusive) unit of social analysis. Immanuel Wallerstein has developed the best-known version of world-systems analysis, beginning in the 1970s. Wallerstein traces the rise of the capitalist world-economy from the "long" 16th century (c. 14501640). The rise of capitalism, in his view, was an accidental outcome of the protracted crisis of feudalism (c. 12901450). Europe (the West) used its advantages and gained control over most of the world economy and presided over the development and spread of industrialization and capitalist economy, indirectly resulting in unequal development.
==== Systems theory ====
Niklas Luhmann described modern capitalism as dividing society into different systems economic, educational, scientific, legal, political and other systems which together form the system of systems that is society itself. This system is in turn formed by communication, which is defined as the "synthesis of information, utterance, and understanding" emerging from verbal and non-verbal activities. A social system is similar to a biological organism by reproducing itself through communication developing from communication. A system is anything with a 'distinction' from its environment, which is itself formed by other systems. These systems are connected by 'structural couplings' which translate communications from one system to another (including from humans to systems), the lack of which is a problem for modern capitalism.
==== Post-structuralism and postmodernism ====
In the 1960s and 1970s post-structuralist and postmodernist theory, drawing upon structuralism and phenomenology as much as classical social science, made a considerable impact on frames of sociological enquiry. Often understood simply as a cultural style 'after-Modernism' marked by intertextuality, pastiche and irony, sociological analyses of postmodernity have presented a distinct era relating to (1) the dissolution of metanarratives (particularly in the work of Lyotard), and (2) commodity fetishism and the 'mirroring' of identity with consumption in late capitalist society (Debord; Baudrillard; Jameson). Postmodernism has also been associated with the rejection of enlightenment conceptions of the human subject by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss and, to a lesser extent, in Louis Althusser's attempt to reconcile Marxism with anti-humanism. Most theorists associated with the movement actively refused the label, preferring to accept postmodernity as a historical phenomenon rather than a method of analysis, if at all. Nevertheless, self-consciously postmodern pieces continue to emerge within the social and political sciences in general.
=== Late 20th century sociology ===
==== Intersectionality ====
In the 1980's, bell hooks argued that white and non-white women faced different obstacles in society. Kimberlé Crenshaw subsequently developed the concept of intersectionality in 1989 to describe the way different identities intersected to create differing forms of discrimination. In 1990, Sylvia Walby argued that six intersecting structures upheld patriarchy: the family household, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality, and cultural institutions. Later, the sociologist Helma Lutz described 14 'lines of difference' which could form the basis of unequal power relations.
==== Globalization ====
Elsewhere in the 1980s, theorists often focused on globalization, communication, and reflexivity in terms of a 'second' phase of modernity, rather than a distinct new era per se. Jürgen Habermas established communicative action as a reaction to postmodern challenges to the discourse of modernity, informed both by critical theory and American pragmatism. Fellow German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, presented The Risk Society (1992) as an account of the manner in which the modern nation state has become organized. In Britain, Anthony Giddens set out to reconcile recurrent theoretical dichotomies through structuration theory. During the 1990s, Giddens developed work on the challenges of "high modernity", as well as a new 'third way' politics that would greatly influence New Labour in U.K. and the Clinton administration in the U.S. Leading Polish sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, wrote extensively on the concepts of modernity and postmodernity, particularly with regard to the Holocaust and consumerism as historical phenomena. While Pierre Bourdieu gained significant critical acclaim for his continued work on cultural capital, certain French sociologists, particularly Jean Baudrillard and Michel Maffesoli, were criticised for perceived obfuscation and relativism.
Functionalist systems theorists such as Niklas Luhmann remained dominant forces in sociology up to the end of the century. In 1994, Robert K. Merton won the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the sociology of science. The positivist tradition is popular to this day, particularly in the United States. The discipline's two most widely cited American journals, the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review, primarily publish research in the positivist tradition, with ASR exhibiting greater diversity (the British Journal of Sociology, on the other hand, publishes primarily non-positivist articles). The twentieth century saw improvements to the quantitative methodologies employed in sociology. The development of longitudinal studies that follow the same population over the course of years or decades enabled researchers to study long-term phenomena and increased the researchers' ability to infer causality.

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The history of sports extends back to the Ancient world in 7000 BC. The physical activity that developed into sports had early links with warfare and entertainment.
The study of the history of sport provides insights into social change and the evolution of sport itself, as sporting activities have often been linked to the development of basic human skills (see also play). However, the further one traces back into history, the scarcer the evidence becomes, making it increasingly difficult to support theories about the origins and purposes of sport.
As far back as the beginnings of sport, it was related to military training. For example, competition was used as a mean to determine whether individuals were fit and useful for service. Team sports were used to train and to prove the capability to fight in the military and also to work together as a team (military unit).
== Ancient era ==
=== Sports in pre-history ===
Cave paintings found in the Lascaux caves in France appear to depict sprinting in the Upper Paleolithic around 15,300 years ago. Cave paintings in the Bayankhongor Province of Mongolia dating back to the Neolithic Age (c.7000 BC) show a wrestling match surrounded by crowds. Neolithic Rock art found at the cave of swimmers in Wadi Sura, near Gilf Kebir in Egypt shows evidence of swimming and archery being practiced around 10,000 BCE. Prehistoric cave paintings in Japan depict a sport similar to sumo wrestling.
=== Ancient Sumer ===
Archaeological evidence shows that various depictions of wrestlers have been found on stone slabs from the Sumerian civilization. One slab, showing three pairs of wrestlers, has been dated to around 3000 BC.
A cast bronze figurine—possibly the base of a vase—found at Khafaji in Iraq depicts two figures in a wrestling hold and dates to around 2600 BC. Considered one of the earliest known representations of sport, the statue is housed in the National Museum of Iraq.
Additional evidence suggests that the sport of boxing was also practiced in ancient Sumer.
The Epic of Gilgamesh gives one of the first historical records of sport, with Gilgamesh engaging in a form of belt wrestling with Enkidu. The cuneiform tablets recording the tale date to around 2000 BC; however, the historical Gilgamesh is supposed to have lived around 2800 to 2600 BC. The Sumerian king Shulgi (c. 21st century BCE) boasts of his prowess in sport in the Self-praise of Shulgi A, B, and C.
Fishing hooks not unlike those made today have been found during excavations at Ur, suggesting some sort of angling activity in Sumer around 2600 BC.
=== Ancient Egypt ===
Monuments to the Pharaohs found at Beni Hasan dating to around 2000 BC indicate that several sports, including wrestling, weightlifting, long jump, swimming, rowing, archery, fishing and athletics, as well as various kinds of ball games, were well-developed and regulated in Ancient Egypt. Other Egyptian sports also included javelin throwing and high jump. An earlier portrayal of figures wrestling was found in the tomb of Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum in Saqqara dating to around 2400 BC.
=== Ancient Greece ===
The Minoan art of Bronze Age Crete depict ritual sporting events - thus a fresco dating to 1500 BC records gymnastics in the form of religious bull-leaping and possibly bullfighting. The origins of Greek sporting festivals may date to funeral games of the Mycenean period, between 1600 BCE and c. 1100 BC. The Iliad includes extensive descriptions of funeral games held in honor of deceased warriors, such as those held for Patroclus by Achilles. Engaging in sport is described as the occupation of the noble and wealthy, who have no need to do manual labor themselves. In the Odyssey, king Odysseus of Ithaca proves his royal status to king Alkinoös of the Phaiakes by showing his proficiency in throwing the javelin.
It was in Greece that sports were first instituted formally, with the first Olympic Games recorded in 776 BC in Olympia, where they were celebrated until 393 AD. These games took place every four years, or Olympiad, which became a unit of time in historical chronologies. Initially a single sprinting event, the Olympics gradually expanded to include several footraces, run in the nude or in armor, boxing, wrestling, pankration, chariot racing, long jump, javelin throw, and discus throw. During the celebration of the games, an Olympic Truce came into effect, allowing athletes to travel from their home polities to the games in safety. The prizes for the victors were wreaths of laurel leaves.
Other important sporting events in ancient Greece included the Isthmian Games, the Nemean Games, and the Pythian Games. Together with the Olympics, these were the most prestigious games, and formed the Panhellenic Games. Some games, e.g. the Panathenaia of Athens, included musical, reading and other non-athletic contests in addition to regular sports-events. The Heraean Games, held in Olympia as early as the 6th century BCE, were the first recorded sporting competition for women.
=== Ancient sports elsewhere ===

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A polished bone implement found at Eva in Tennessee, United States and dated to around 5000 BCE has been construed as a possible sporting device used in a "ring and pin" game.
There are artifacts and structures that suggest the Chinese engaged in sporting activities as early as 2000 BCE. Gymnastics appears to have been a popular sport in China's ancient past.
The Mesoamerican ballgame originated over three thousand years ago. The Mayan ballgame, known as Pitz, is believed to be the first ball sport, as it was played around 1200 BCE.
Sports that are at least two and a half thousand years old include hurling in Ancient Ireland, shinty in Scotland, harpastum (similar to rugby) in Rome, cuju (similar to association football) in China, and polo in Persia.
Ancient Persian sports include the traditional Iranian martial art of Zourkhaneh. Among other sports that originated in Persia are chovgan (polo) and jousting.
Various traditional sports of India are believed to be thousands of years old, with kho-kho having been played since at least the fourth century BCE, aspects of kabaddi having potentially been mentioned in the Mahabharata, and atya-patya having been described in the Naṟṟiṇai, around 300 AD.
== Middle Ages ==
For at least 900 years, entire villages had competed with each other in rough, and sometimes violent, ballgames in England (Shrovetide football) and Ireland (caid). In comparison, the game of calcio Florentino, in Florence, Italy, was originally reserved for combat sports such as fencing and jousting being popular. The Middle Ages also revealed the importance of owning a horse; common to the sports and amusements of the ruling class was the horse. If someone of the ruling class did not own a horse, it would represent that they did not have much wealth and leisure (since they would be unable to participate in certain activities like horse racing). Horse racing, in particular, was a favorite of the upper class in Great Britain, with Queen Anne founding the Ascot Racecourse.
Long summer days provided predictable opportunities for free time, when peasants could engage in athletic activities. Swimming, wrestling, and racing were common among all ages and both genders, while organized ball games of various types can be found in every medieval society and culture. The participation of sports (ball games to be exact) at the time loosened control the ruling class had over the peasants; this is not a rare trend throughout history. By the fourteenth century no fewer than thirty bans have been placed by English kings on ball games such as football, handball, and hurling.
The Middle Ages were not immediately devoid of sports from the Roman Empire after it collapsed. Gladiatorial bouts and chariot racing continued sporadically and intermittently well into the Middle Ages. They would eventually fade away and be replaced by local activities. Hawking, however, was the particular reserve of emperors and kings. This sport would be one of the few sports continued in the Middle Ages; Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor may have played a critical role in its persistence as he was an avid hawker who authored the first comprehensive book on falconry. Furthermore, kings may have followed the example of falconry as to mimic the status of an emperor.
During the Middle Ages, tournaments were not an uncommon occurrence as war was a constant threat. The medieval hallmarks of upper-class sports (i.e. jousting, mock combat, and blood sports) were generally agreed upon as military training. Modern sports historians, however, debate that such sports were for entertainment purposes; one example considered were tournaments which offered little to prepare one for actual war and would likely have set any forms of real training back. Tournaments in the Middle Ages arose out of local festivals. As a result, many tournaments had their own local characteristic but were uniform in habits and customs of the region the tournament was stationed in.
=== Modern characteristics ===
Medieval tournaments presents characteristics of modern sport as those (ex: professional knights) who were most successful and popular, perhaps the only medieval equivalent to today's sports stars, followed the money and fame of the tournament circuit. Those with political backing and social favor were able to accumulate property and goods to ensure a comfortable life after their competitive days were over. The tournament was a market and a social mixer. These tournaments consequently attracted many people to attend for various purposes such as marriages, and trade of livestock and land or wares provided by merchants and vendors.
Sébastien Nadot writes that sport already existed in the 15th century. He shows that the organization of the chivalry around European contests worked like a system in an elaborate network. He evokes an "chivalrous international", sharing the same codes, especially at tournaments and games. These sporting events went beyond borders and were accompanied by a common cultural base, including courtesy, fair play, honor, and loyalty.
== Renaissance ==

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After the late middle ages, early modern sports became less of a violent or military training activity and more of an activity done for recreational benefit in Europe. During the Renaissance, educators, and medical surgeons promoted playing sports because of their numerous physical and psychological benefits to the human body. During this era, there was also support for moderating sports, as it was viewed as more for leisure than a strict procedure.
Open-air sporting events became an attraction for many and people of all different social hierarchies were involved in this new culture. These new radical ideas about sports made their way into books, and films, and eventually became part of the social culture during the Renaissance. As mentioned by Mike Huggins, Gargantua and Pantagruel written by François Rabelais was a well-known novel published in 1534 that mentioned sports and games as a unit, like many other renowned works of literature. All different types of sports became a functional unit in many people's routines and it brought refreshment into people's lives. As the popularity and involvement of sports increased, rules began to form and sports became more regulated so they could be fair.
Sports clubs and associations which provided a sense of unity also became more common, especially for elite sports such as horse racing, cockfighting, hunting, and tennis during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries. For example, Charles II formed 20 rules for horse racing in 1665. Sports were a form of entertainment for spectators who did not play themselves. There were stake-money contests and prizes in these sports and racing competitions. These modern advancements and developments made about sporting life in the Renaissance in Europe eventually made their way to Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
=== Inspiration from the classical world ===
Throughout the Renaissance inspiration was drawn from various historical time periods but especially Ancient Greece and Rome. Connected to this was the renewed belief in the concept of the interrelated health of the mind and body. This gave rise to a reestablishment of public interest in the gymnasium, a place where citizens could train their bodies and thereby improve themselves not just physically but also intellectually. This promotion of 'sound minds in sound bodies' was believed to have the related benefit of citizens becoming better able to support the communities and nations which they belonged to.
The neoclassical era stemmed from the renaissance and harboured a similar respect for the achievements of the classical world in regard to sport and athletics. This is represented by neoclassical art and especially in sculpture which sought to emulate that of Ancient Greece.
== Development of modern sports ==
Some historians most notably Bernard Lewis claim that team sports as we know them today are primarily an invention of Western culture. British Prime Minister John Major was more explicit in 1995:
We invented the majority of the world's great sports.... 19th century Britain was the cradle of a leisure revolution every bit as significant as the agricultural and industrial revolutions we launched in the century before.
The traditional team sports are seen as springing primarily from Britain, and subsequently exported across the vast British Empire. European colonialism helped spread particular games around the world, especially cricket (not directly related to baseball), football of various sorts, bowling in a number of forms, cue sports (like snooker, carom billiards, and pool), hockey and its derivatives, equestrian, tennis, and many winter sports. The originally European-dominated modern Olympic Games generally also ensured standardization in particularly European, especially British, directions when rules for similar games around the world were merged.
Regardless of game origins, the Industrial Revolution and mass production brought increased leisure which allowed more time to engage in playing or observing (and gambling upon) spectator sports, as well as less elitism in and greater accessibility of sports of many kinds. With the advent of mass media and global communication, professionalism became prevalent in sports, and this furthered sports popularity in general.
With the increasing values placed on those who won also came the increased desire to cheat. Some of the most common ways of cheating today involve the use of performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids. The use of these drugs has always been frowned on but in recent history there have also been agencies set up to monitor professional athletes and ensure fair play in the sport.
=== England ===

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Writing about cricket in particular, John Leach has explained the role of Puritan power, the English Civil War, and the Restoration of the monarchy in England. The Long Parliament in 1642 "banned theatres, which had met with Puritan disapproval. Although similar action would be taken against certain sports, it is not clear if cricket was in any way prohibited, except that players must not break the Sabbath". In 1660, "the Restoration of the monarchy in England was immediately followed by the reopening of the theaters and so any sanctions that had been imposed by the Puritans on cricket would also have been lifted." He goes on to make the key point that political, social and economic conditions in the aftermath of the Restoration encouraged excessive gambling, so much so that a Gambling Act was deemed necessary in 1664. It is certain that cricket, horse racing and boxing (i.e., prizefighting) were financed by gambling interests. Leech explains that it was the habit of cricket patrons, all of whom were gamblers, to form strong teams through the 18th century to represent their interests. He defines a strong team as one representative of more than one parish and he is certain that such teams were first assembled in or immediately after 1660.
Prior to the English Civil War and the Commonwealth, all available evidence concludes that cricket had evolved to the level of village cricket only where teams that are strictly representative of individual parishes compete. The "strong teams" of the post-restoration mark the evolution of cricket (and, indeed of professional team sport, for cricket is the oldest professional team sport) from the parish standard to the county standard. This was the point of origin for major, or first-class, cricket. The year 1660 also marks the origin of professional team sport. Rest of England cricket teams have played since 1739.
A number of the public schools such as Winchester and Eton, introduced variants of football and other sports for their pupils. These were described at the time as "innocent and lawful", certainly in comparison with the rougher rural games. With urbanization in the 19th century, the rural games moved to the new urban centres and came under the influence of the middle and upper classes. The rules and regulations devised at English institutions began to be applied to the wider game, with governing bodies in England being set up for a number of sports by the end of the 19th century. The rising influence of the upper class also produced an emphasis on the amateur, and the spirit of "fair play". The industrial revolution also brought with it increasing mobility, and created the opportunity for universities in Britain to compete with one another. This sparked increasing attempts to unify and reconcile various games in England, leading to the establishment of the Football Association in London, the first official governing body in football.
For sports to become professionalized, coaching had to come first. It gradually professionalized in the Victorian Era and the role was well established by 1914. In the First World War, military units sought out the coaches to supervise physical conditioning and develop morale-building teams. Sport became an important part of military life for British servicemen serving around the world.
=== The British Empire and post-colonial sports ===
The influence of British sports and their codified rules began to spread across the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A number of major teams elsewhere in the world still show these British origins in their names, such as A.C. Milan in Italy, Grêmio Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense in Brazil, and Athletic Bilbao in Spain. Cricket became popular in several of the nations of the then British Empire, such as Australia, South Africa, and South Asian nations such as India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan (see also: Sport in British India). Today, 90% of the sport's fans are in the subcontinent, with the game remaining popular in and beyond today's Commonwealth of Nations. The revival of the Olympic Games by Baron Pierre de Coubertin was also heavily influenced by the amateur ethos of the English public schools. The British played a major role in defining amateurism, professionalism, the tournament system and the concept of fair play. Some sports developed in England, spread to other countries and then lost its popularity in England while remaining actively played in other countries, a notable example being bandy which remains popular in Finland, Kazakhstan, Norway, Russia, and Sweden.
European morals and views on empires were embedded in the structure of sports. Ideas of "social discipline" and "loyalty" were key factors in European empire etiquette, which eventually transferred into sports etiquette. Also ideas of "patient and methodical training", were enforced to make soldiers stronger, and athletes better. Diffusion helped with the process of connecting these two concepts and has helped shaped the values of sports as we know it today. Sports like baseball, football (soccer), and cricket all came from European influence, and all share the same values based on European empires. In the case of the British Empire, the victory of the colonies in sports helped in transitioning out of empire.
Worldwide, the British influence includes many different football codes, lawn bowls, lawn tennis and other sports. The major impetus for this was the patenting of the world's first lawn mower in 1830. This allowed for the preparation of modern ovals, playing fields, pitches, grass courts, etc.
=== United States ===

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Most sports in the United States evolved out of European practices. However, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, water skiing, and snowboarding are North American inventions, some of which have become popular in other countries. However, lacrosse and surfing in particular arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.
During the colonial era, baseball (closely related to English rounders and French la soule, and less clearly connected to cricket) became established in the urban Northeastern United States, with the first rules being codified in the 1840s, while American football was very popular in the south-east, with baseball spreading to the south, and American football spreading to the north after the Civil War. There is documented evidence of baseball in England. An extract from an 18th-century diary containing the oldest known reference to baseball is among the items on display in a new exhibition in London exploring the English origins and cricketing connections of America's national sport.
While baseball was once claimed to have been invented in the U.S. in the mid-19th century, recent findings suggest a sport of the same name may have evolved decades earlier alongside cricket, crossing the Atlantic with English settlers to the American colonies. One notable discovery found in a shed in a village in Surrey, southern England, in 2008 was a handwritten 18th-century diary belonging to a local lawyer, William Bray. "Went to Stoke church this morn.," wrote Bray on Easter Monday in 1755. "After dinner, went to Miss Jeale's to play at base ball with her the 3 Miss Whiteheads, Miss Billinghurst, Miss Molly Flutter, Mr. Chandler, Mr. Ford and H. Parsons. Drank tea and stayed til 8." In the 1870s the game split between the professionals and amateurs; the professional game rapidly gained dominance, and marked a shift in the focus from the player to the club. The rise of baseball also helped squeeze out other sports such as cricket, which had been popular in Philadelphia prior to the rise of baseball.
American football (and gridiron football more generally) also has its origins in the English variants of the game, with the first set of intercollegiate football rules based directly on the rules of the Football Association in London. However, Harvard chose to play a game based on the rules of Rugby football. Walter Camp would then heavily modify this variant in the 1880s, with the modifications also heavily influencing the rules of Canadian football.
=== Around the world ===
== Contemporary era ==
The 21st century has seen a move towards adventure sports as a form of individual escapism, transcending the routines of life. Examples include white water rafting, paragliding, canyoning, base jumping, and orienteering.
Shorter formats have been invented for various sports, such as T20 cricket and 3x3 basketball. The Youth Olympic Games has helped in globalizing some of these formats, such as 3x3 and hockey5s. Urban sports in general have become prioritized to a greater extent for inclusion in the Olympic Games, due to their ability to appeal to youth and generate digital engagement. Traditional non-Western sports, which had been diminished by Western dominance in earlier centuries, have also become newly popularized and standardized.
== Women's sport history ==
Women's competition in sports has been frowned upon by many societies in the past. The English public-school background of organized sport in the 19th and early 20th century led to a paternalism that tended to discourage women's involvement in sports, with, for example, no women officially competing in the 1896 Olympic Games.
The 20th century saw major advances in the participation of women in sports due to a growing women's sports movement in Europe and North America. This led to the initiation of the Women's Olympiad (held three times 1921, 1922 and 1923) and the Women's World Games (held four times (1922, 1926, 1930 and 1934. In 1924 the 1924 Women's Olympiad was held in London. The increase in girls' and women's participation in sport has been partly influenced by the women's rights and feminist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. In the United States, female student participation in sports was significantly boosted by the Title IX Act in 1972, which forbade gender discrimination in all aspects of any educational environment that uses federal financial aid, leading to increased funding and support to develop female athletes.
Pressure from sports funding bodies has also improved gender equality in sports. For example, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the Leander Club (for rowing) in England had both been male-only establishments since their founding in 1787 and 1818, respectively, but both opened their doors to female members at the end of the 20th century at least partially due to the requirements of the United Kingdom Lottery Sports Fund.
The 21st century has seen women's participation in sport at its all-time highest. At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, women competed in 27 sports over 137 events, compared to 28 men's sports in 175 events. Several national women's professional sports leagues have been founded and are in competition, and women's international sporting events such as the FIFA Women's World Cup, Women's Rugby World Cup, and Women's Hockey World Cup continue to grow.
== Stadia through the ages ==
== See also ==
Sport in the United Kingdom § History
Sport in England
History of physical training and fitness
History of sport in Australia
History of sports in Canada
History of sport in the United States
Nationalism and sport
Sociology of sport
== References ==

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== Further reading ==
S. Battente, The idea of sport in western culture from antiquity to the contemporary era, Vernon press, 2020.
Crawford Scott, A. G. M. Serious Aport: J. A. Mangan's Contribution to the History of Sport, Portland, Oregon: Frank Cass (2004)
Guttmann, Allen. Women's Sports: A History, Columbia University Press (1992)
Guttmann, Allen. Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism, Columbia University Press, 1996
Guttmann, Allen. The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (2002)
Holt, Richard. Sport and Society in Modern France (1981).
Holt, Richard. Sport and the British: A Modern History (1990) excerpt
Howell, Colin. Blood, Sweat, and Cheers: Sport and the Making of Modern Canada (2001)
Mangan, J. A. (1996). Militarism, Sport, Europe: War Without Weapons. Routledge.
Mann, Christian (2025). Griechische Athleten. Eine Sozialgeschichte [Greek athletes. A social history]. Stuttgart: Steiner, ISBN 978-3-515-13956-4.
Maurer, Michael. "Vom Mutterland des Sports zum Kontinent: Der Transfer des englischen Sports im 19. Jahrhundert", Mainz: European History Online (2011), retrieved: 25 February 2012.
Morrow, Don; Wamsley, Kevin B. Sport in Canada: A History (2009)
Murray, Bill. The World's Game: A History of Soccer (1998)
Polley, Martin. Sports History: A Practical Guide, Palgrave, 2007.
Journals
online article from The Sports Historian 1993-2001
European Studies in Sport History [1]
The International Journal of the History of Sport
Journal of Sport History
Sport History Journal
Sport in History
Stadion: International Journal of Sport History
Sport History Review
Nikephoros. Zeitschrift für Sport und Kultur im Altertum [Nikephoros. Journal for sports and culture in antiquity]
== External links ==
European Committee for Sports History (CESH)
Asean Sport

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Statistics, in the modern sense of the word, began evolving in the 18th century in response to the novel needs of industrializing sovereign states.
In early times, the meaning was restricted to information about states, particularly demographics such as population. This was later extended to include all collections of information of all types, and later still it was extended to include the analysis and interpretation of such data. In modern terms, "statistics" means both sets of collected information, as in national accounts and temperature record, and analytical work which requires statistical inference. Statistical activities are often associated with models expressed using probabilities, hence the connection with probability theory. The large requirements of data processing have made statistics a key application of computing. A number of statistical concepts have an important impact on a wide range of sciences. These include the design of experiments and approaches to statistical inference such as Bayesian inference, each of which can be considered to have their own sequence in the development of the ideas underlying modern statistics.
== Introduction ==
By the 18th century, the term "statistics" designated the systematic collection of demographic and economic data by states. For at least two millennia, these data were mainly tabulations of human and material resources that might be taxed or put to military use. In the early 19th century, collection intensified, and the meaning of "statistics" broadened to include the discipline concerned with the collection, summary, and analysis of data. Today, data is collected and statistics are computed and widely distributed in government, business, most of the sciences and sports, and even for many pastimes. Electronic computers have expedited more elaborate statistical computation even as they have facilitated the collection and aggregation of data. A single data analyst may have available a set of data-files with millions of records, each with dozens or hundreds of separate measurements. These were collected over time from computer activity (for example, a stock exchange) or from computerized sensors, point-of-sale registers, and so on. Computers then produce simple, accurate summaries, and allow more tedious analyses, such as those that require inverting a large matrix or perform hundreds of steps of iteration, that would never be attempted by hand. Faster computing has allowed statisticians to develop "computer-intensive" methods which may look at all permutations, or use randomization to look at 10,000 permutations of a problem, to estimate answers that are not easy to quantify by theory alone.
The term "mathematical statistics" designates the mathematical theories of probability and statistical inference, which are used in statistical practice. The relation between statistics and probability theory developed rather late, however. In the 19th century, statistics increasingly used probability theory, whose initial results were found in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in the analysis of games of chance (gambling). By 1800, astronomy used probability models and statistical theories, particularly the method of least squares. Early probability theory and statistics was systematized in the 19th century and statistical reasoning and probability models were used by social scientists to advance the new sciences of experimental psychology and sociology, and by physical scientists in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The development of statistical reasoning was closely associated with the development of inductive logic and the scientific method, which are concerns that move statisticians away from the narrower area of mathematical statistics. Much of the theoretical work was readily available by the time computers were available to exploit them. By the 1970s, Johnson and Kotz produced a four-volume Compendium on Statistical Distributions (1st ed., 19691972), which is still an invaluable resource.
Applied statistics can be regarded as not a field of mathematics but an autonomous mathematical science, like computer science and operations research. Unlike mathematics, statistics had its origins in public administration. Applications arose early in demography and economics; large areas of micro- and macro-economics today are "statistics" with an emphasis on time-series analyses. With its emphasis on learning from data and making best predictions, statistics also has been shaped by areas of academic research including psychological testing, medicine and epidemiology. The ideas of statistical testing have considerable overlap with decision science. With its concerns with searching and effectively presenting data, statistics has overlap with information science and computer science.
== Etymology ==
Look up statistics in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
The term statistics is ultimately derived from the Neo-Latin statisticum collegium ("council of state") and the Italian word statista ("statesman" or "politician"). The German Statistik, first introduced by Gottfried Achenwall (1749), originally designated the analysis of data about the state, signifying the "science of state" (then called political arithmetic in English). It acquired the meaning of the collection and classification of data generally in the early 19th century. It was introduced into English in 1791 by Sir John Sinclair when he published the first of 21 volumes titled Statistical Account of Scotland.
== Origins in probability theory ==

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Basic forms of statistics have been used since the beginning of civilization. Early empires often collated censuses of the population or recorded the trade in various commodities. The Han dynasty and the Roman Empire were some of the first states to extensively gather data on the size of the empire's population, geographical area and wealth.
The use of statistical methods dates back to at least the 5th century BCE. The historian Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War describes how the Athenians calculated the height of the wall of Platea by counting the number of bricks in an unplastered section of the wall sufficiently near them to be able to count them. The count was repeated several times by a number of soldiers. The most frequent value (in modern terminology the mode) so determined was taken to be the most likely value of the number of bricks. Multiplying this value by the height of the bricks used in the wall allowed the Athenians to determine the height of the ladders necessary to scale the walls.
The Trial of the Pyx is a test of the purity of the coinage of the Royal Mint which has been held on a regular basis since the 12th century. The Trial itself is based on statistical sampling methods. After minting a series of coins originally from ten pounds of silver a single coin was placed in the Pyx a box in Westminster Abbey. After a given period now once a year the coins are removed and weighed. A sample of coins removed from the box are then tested for purity.
The Nuova Cronica, a 14th-century history of Florence by the Florentine banker and official Giovanni Villani, includes much statistical information on population, ordinances, commerce and trade, education, and religious facilities and has been described as the first introduction of statistics as a positive element in history, though neither the term nor the concept of statistics as a specific field yet existed.
The arithmetic mean, although a concept known to the Greeks, was not generalised to more than two values until the 16th century. The invention of the decimal system by Simon Stevin in 1585 seems likely to have facilitated these calculations. This method was first adopted in astronomy by Tycho Brahe who was attempting to reduce the errors in his estimates of the locations of various celestial bodies.
The idea of the median originated in Edward Wright's book on navigation (Certaine Errors in Navigation) in 1599 in a section concerning the determination of location with a compass. Wright felt that this value was the most likely to be the correct value in a series of observations. The difference between the mean and the median was noticed in 1669 by Chistiaan Huygens in the context of using Graunt's tables.

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The term 'statistic' was introduced by the Italian scholar Girolamo Ghilini in 1589 with reference to this science. The birth of statistics is often dated to 1662, when John Graunt, along with William Petty, developed early human statistical and census methods that provided a framework for modern demography. He produced the first life table, giving probabilities of survival to each age. His book Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality used analysis of the mortality rolls to make the first statistically based estimation of the population of London. He knew that there were around 13,000 funerals per year in London and that three people died per eleven families per year. He estimated from the parish records that the average family size was 8 and calculated that the population of London was about 384,000; this is the first known use of a ratio estimator. Laplace in 1802 estimated the population of France with a similar method; see Ratio estimator § History for details.
Although the original scope of statistics was limited to data useful for governance, the approach was extended to many fields of a scientific or commercial nature during the 19th century. The mathematical foundations for the subject heavily drew on the new probability theory, pioneered in the 16th century by Gerolamo Cardano, Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal. Christiaan Huygens (1657) gave the earliest known scientific treatment of the subject. Jakob Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi (posthumous, 1713) and Abraham de Moivre's The Doctrine of Chances (1718) treated the subject as a branch of mathematics. In his book Bernoulli introduced the idea of representing complete certainty as one and probability as a number between zero and one.
In 1700, Isaac Newton carried out the earliest known form of linear regression, writing the first of the ordinary least squares normal equations, averaging astronomical data, and summing the residuals to zero in his analysis of Hipparchuss equinox observations. He distinguished between two inhomogeneous sets of data and might have thought of an optimal solution in terms of bias, but not in effectiveness.
A key early application of statistics in the 18th century was to the human sex ratio at birth. John Arbuthnot studied this question in 1710. Arbuthnot examined birth records in London for each of the 82 years from 1629 to 1710. In every year, the number of males born in London exceeded the number of females. Considering more male or more female births as equally likely, the probability of the observed outcome is 0.5^82, or about 1 in 4,8360,0000,0000,0000,0000,0000; in modern terms, the p-value. This is vanishingly small, leading Arbuthnot that this was not due to chance, but to divine providence: "From whence it follows, that it is Art, not Chance, that governs." This is and other work by Arbuthnot is credited as "the first use of significance tests" the first example of reasoning about statistical significance and moral certainty, and "... perhaps the first published report of a nonparametric test ...", specifically the sign test; see details at Sign test § History.
The formal study of theory of errors may be traced back to Roger Cotes' Opera Miscellanea (posthumous, 1722), but a memoir prepared by Thomas Simpson in 1755 (printed 1756) first applied the theory to the discussion of errors of observation. The reprint (1757) of this memoir lays down the axioms that positive and negative errors are equally probable, and that there are certain assignable limits within which all errors may be supposed to fall; continuous errors are discussed and a probability curve is given. Simpson discussed several possible distributions of error. He first considered the uniform distribution and then the discrete symmetric triangular distribution followed by the continuous symmetric triangle distribution. Tobias Mayer, in his study of the libration of the moon (Kosmographische Nachrichten, Nuremberg, 1750), invented the first formal method for estimating the unknown quantities by generalized the averaging of observations under identical circumstances to the averaging of groups of similar equations.
Roger Joseph Boscovich in 1755 based in his work on the shape of the earth proposed in his book De Litteraria expeditione per pontificiam ditionem ad dimetiendos duos meridiani gradus a PP. Maire et Boscovicli that the true value of a series of observations would be that which minimises the sum of absolute errors. In modern terminology this value is the median. The first example of what later became known as the normal curve was studied by Abraham de Moivre who plotted this curve on November 12, 1733. de Moivre was studying the number of heads that occurred when a 'fair' coin was tossed.
In 1763 Richard Price transmitted to the Royal Society Thomas Bayes proof of a rule for using a binomial distribution to calculate a posterior probability on a prior event.
In 1765 Joseph Priestley invented the first timeline charts.
Johann Heinrich Lambert in his 1765 book Anlage zur Architectonic proposed the semicircle as a distribution of errors:
f
(
x
)
=
1
2
(
1
x
2
)
{\displaystyle f(x)={\frac {1}{2}}{\sqrt {(1-x^{2})}}}
with -1 < x < 1.

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Pierre-Simon Laplace (1774) made the first attempt to deduce a rule for the combination of observations from the principles of the theory of probabilities. He represented the law of probability of errors by a curve and deduced a formula for the mean of three observations.
Laplace in 1774 noted that the frequency of an error could be expressed as an exponential function of its magnitude once its sign was disregarded. This distribution is now known as the Laplace distribution. Lagrange proposed a parabolic fractal distribution of errors in 1776.
Laplace in 1778 published his second law of errors wherein he noted that the frequency of an error was proportional to the exponential of the square of its magnitude. This was subsequently rediscovered by Gauss (possibly in 1795) and is now best known as the normal distribution which is of central importance in statistics. This distribution was first referred to as the normal distribution by C. S. Peirce in 1873 who was studying measurement errors when an object was dropped onto a wooden base. He chose the term normal because of its frequent occurrence in naturally occurring variables.
Lagrange also suggested in 1781 two other distributions for errors a raised cosine distribution and a logarithmic distribution.
Laplace gave (1781) a formula for the law of facility of error (a term due to Joseph Louis Lagrange, 1774), but one which led to unmanageable equations. Daniel Bernoulli (1778) introduced the principle of the maximum product of the probabilities of a system of concurrent errors.
In 1786 William Playfair (17591823) introduced the idea of graphical representation into statistics. He invented the line chart, bar chart and histogram and incorporated them into his works on economics, the Commercial and Political Atlas. This was followed in 1795 by his invention of the pie chart and circle chart which he used to display the evolution of England's imports and exports. These latter charts came to general attention when he published examples in his Statistical Breviary in 1801.
Laplace, in an investigation of the motions of Saturn and Jupiter in 1787, generalized Mayer's method by using different linear combinations of a single group of equations.
In 1791 Sir John Sinclair introduced the term 'statistics' into English in his Statistical Accounts of Scotland.
In 1802 Laplace estimated the population of France to be 28,328,612. He calculated this figure using the number of births in the previous year and census data for three communities. The census data of these communities showed that they had 2,037,615 persons and that the number of births were 71,866. Assuming that these samples were representative of France, Laplace produced his estimate for the entire population.
The method of least squares, which was used to minimize errors in data measurement, was published independently by Adrien-Marie Legendre (1805), Robert Adrain (1808), and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1809). Gauss had used the method in his famous 1801 prediction of the location of the dwarf planet Ceres. The observations that Gauss based his calculations on were made by the Italian monk Piazzi.
The method of least squares was preceded by the use a median regression slope. This method minimizing the sum of the absolute deviances. A method of estimating this slope was invented by Roger Joseph Boscovich in 1760 which he applied to astronomy.
The term probable error (der wahrscheinliche Fehler) the median deviation from the mean was introduced in 1815 by the German astronomer Frederik Wilhelm Bessel. Antoine Augustin Cournot in 1843 was the first to use the term median (valeur médiane) for the value that divides a probability distribution into two equal halves.
Other contributors to the theory of errors were Ellis (1844), De Morgan (1864), Glaisher (1872), and Giovanni Schiaparelli (1875). Peters's (1856) formula for
r
{\displaystyle r}
, the "probable error" of a single observation was widely used and inspired early robust statistics (resistant to outliers: see Peirce's criterion).
In the 19th century authors on statistical theory included Laplace, S. Lacroix (1816), Littrow (1833), Dedekind (1860), Helmert (1872), Laurent (1873), Liagre, Didion, De Morgan and Boole.
Gustav Theodor Fechner used the median (Centralwerth) in sociological and psychological phenomena. It had earlier been used only in astronomy and related fields. Francis Galton used the English term median for the first time in 1881 having earlier used the terms middle-most value in 1869 and the medium in 1880.
Adolphe Quetelet (17961874), another important founder of statistics, introduced the notion of the "average man" (l'homme moyen) as a means of understanding complex social phenomena such as crime rates, marriage rates, and suicide rates.
The first tests of the normal distribution were invented by the German statistician Wilhelm Lexis in the 1870s. The only data sets available to him that he was able to show were normally distributed were birth rates.
=== Development of modern statistics ===
Although the origins of statistical theory lie in the 18th-century advances in probability, the modern field of statistics only emerged in the late-19th and early-20th century in three stages. The first wave, at the turn of the century, was led by the work of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, who transformed statistics into a rigorous mathematical discipline used for analysis, not just in science, but in industry and politics as well. The second wave of the 1910s and 20s was initiated by William Sealy Gosset, and reached its culmination in the insights of Ronald Fisher. This involved the development of better design of experiments models, hypothesis testing and techniques for use with small data samples. The final wave, which mainly saw the refinement and expansion of earlier developments, emerged from the collaborative work between Egon Pearson and Jerzy Neyman in the 1930s. Today, statistical methods are applied in all fields that involve decision making, for making accurate inferences from a collated body of data and for making decisions in the face of uncertainty based on statistical methodology.

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The first statistical bodies were established in the early 19th century. The Royal Statistical Society was founded in 1834 and Florence Nightingale, its first female member, pioneered the application of statistical analysis to health problems for the furtherance of epidemiological understanding and public health practice. However, the methods then used would not be considered as modern statistics today.
The Oxford scholar Francis Ysidro Edgeworth's book, Metretike: or The Method of Measuring Probability and Utility (1887) dealt with probability as the basis of inductive reasoning, and his later works focused on the 'philosophy of chance'. His first paper on statistics (1883) explored the law of error (normal distribution), and his Methods of Statistics (1885) introduced an early version of the t distribution, the Edgeworth expansion, the Edgeworth series, the method of variate transformation and the asymptotic theory of maximum likelihood estimates.
The Norwegian Anders Nicolai Kiær introduced the concept of stratified sampling in 1895. Arthur Lyon Bowley introduced new methods of data sampling in 1906 when working on social statistics. Although statistical surveys of social conditions had started with Charles Booth's "Life and Labour of the People in London" (18891903) and Seebohm Rowntree's "Poverty, A Study of Town Life" (1901), Bowley's key innovation consisted of the use of random sampling techniques. His efforts culminated in his New Survey of London Life and Labour.
Francis Galton is credited as one of the principal founders of statistical theory. His contributions to the field included introducing the concepts of standard deviation, correlation, regression and the application of these methods to the study of the variety of human characteristics height, weight, eyelash length among others. He found that many of these could be fitted to a normal curve distribution.
Galton submitted a paper to Nature in 1907 on the usefulness of the median. He examined the accuracy of 787 guesses of the weight of an ox at a country fair. The actual weight was 1208 pounds: the median guess was 1198. The guesses were markedly non-normally distributed (cf. Wisdom of the Crowd).

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Galton's publication of Natural Inheritance in 1889 sparked the interest of a brilliant mathematician, Karl Pearson, then working at University College London, and he went on to found the discipline of mathematical statistics. He emphasised the statistical foundation of scientific laws and promoted its study and his laboratory attracted students from around the world attracted by his new methods of analysis, including Udny Yule. His work grew to encompass the fields of biology, epidemiology, anthropometry, medicine and social history. In 1901, with Walter Weldon, founder of biometry, and Galton, he founded the journal Biometrika as the first journal of mathematical statistics and biometry.
His work, and that of Galton, underpins many of the 'classical' statistical methods which are in common use today, including the Correlation coefficient, defined as a product-moment; the method of moments for the fitting of distributions to samples; Pearson's system of continuous curves that forms the basis of the now conventional continuous probability distributions; Chi distance a precursor and special case of the Mahalanobis distance and P-value, defined as the probability measure of the complement of the ball with the hypothesized value as center point and chi distance as radius. He also introduced the term 'standard deviation'.
He also founded the statistical hypothesis testing theory, Pearson's chi-squared test and principal component analysis. In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London.
The second wave of mathematical statistics was pioneered by Ronald Fisher who wrote two textbooks, Statistical Methods for Research Workers, published in 1925 and The Design of Experiments in 1935, that were to define the academic discipline in universities around the world. He also systematized previous results, putting them on a firm mathematical footing. In his 1918 seminal paper The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance, the first use to use the statistical term, variance. In 1919, at Rothamsted Experimental Station he started a major study of the extensive collections of data recorded over many years. This resulted in a series of reports under the general title Studies in Crop Variation. In 1930 he published The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection where he applied statistics to evolution.
Over the next seven years, he pioneered the principles of the design of experiments (see below) and elaborated his studies of analysis of variance. He furthered his studies of the statistics of small samples. Perhaps even more important, he began his systematic approach of the analysis of real data as the springboard for the development of new statistical methods. He developed computational algorithms for analyzing data from his balanced experimental designs. In 1925, this work resulted in the publication of his first book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers. This book went through many editions and translations in later years, and it became the standard reference work for scientists in many disciplines. In 1935, this book was followed by The Design of Experiments, which was also widely used.
In addition to analysis of variance, Fisher named and promoted the method of maximum likelihood estimation. Fisher also originated the concepts of sufficiency, ancillary statistics, Fisher's linear discriminator and Fisher information. His article On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics (1924) presented Pearson's chi-squared test and William Sealy Gosset's t in the same framework as the Gaussian distribution, and his own parameter in the analysis of variance Fisher's z-distribution (more commonly used decades later in the form of the F distribution).
The 5% level of significance appears to have been introduced by Fisher in 1925. Fisher stated that deviations exceeding twice the standard deviation are regarded as significant. Before this deviations exceeding three times the probable error were considered significant. For a symmetrical distribution the probable error is half the interquartile range. For a normal distribution the probable error is approximately 2/3 the standard deviation. It appears that Fisher's 5% criterion was rooted in previous practice.
Other important contributions at this time included Charles Spearman's rank correlation coefficient that was a useful extension of the Pearson correlation coefficient. William Sealy Gosset, the English statistician better known under his pseudonym of Student, introduced Student's t-distribution, a continuous probability distribution useful in situations where the sample size is small and population standard deviation is unknown.
Egon Pearson (Karl's son) and Jerzy Neyman introduced the concepts of "Type II" error, power of a test and confidence intervals. Jerzy Neyman in 1934 showed that stratified random sampling was in general a better method of estimation than purposive (quota) sampling.
== Design of experiments ==

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In 1747, while serving as surgeon on HM Bark Salisbury, James Lind carried out a controlled experiment to develop a cure for scurvy. In this study his subjects' cases "were as similar as I could have them", that is he provided strict entry requirements to reduce extraneous variation. The men were paired, which provided blocking. From a modern perspective, the main thing that is missing is randomized allocation of subjects to treatments.
Lind is today often described as a one-factor-at-a-time experimenter. Similar one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) experimentation was performed at the Rothamsted Research Station in the 1840s by Sir John Lawes to determine the optimal inorganic fertilizer for use on wheat.
A theory of statistical inference was developed by Charles S. Peirce in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" (18771878) and "A Theory of Probable Inference" (1883), two publications that emphasized the importance of randomization-based inference in statistics. In another study, Peirce randomly assigned volunteers to a blinded, repeated-measures design to evaluate their ability to discriminate weights.
Peirce's experiment inspired other researchers in psychology and education, which developed a research tradition of randomized experiments in laboratories and specialized textbooks in the 1800s. Peirce also contributed the first English-language publication on an optimal design for regression-models in 1876. A pioneering optimal design for polynomial regression was suggested by Gergonne in 1815. In 1918 Kirstine Smith published optimal designs for polynomials of degree six (and less).
The use of a sequence of experiments, where the design of each may depend on the results of previous experiments, including the possible decision to stop experimenting, was pioneered by Abraham Wald in the context of sequential tests of statistical hypotheses. Surveys are available of optimal sequential designs, and of adaptive designs. One specific type of sequential design is the "two-armed bandit", generalized to the multi-armed bandit, on which early work was done by Herbert Robbins in 1952.
The term "design of experiments" (DOE) derives from early statistical work performed by Sir Ronald Fisher. He was described by Anders Hald as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science." Fisher initiated the principles of design of experiments and elaborated on his studies of "analysis of variance". Perhaps even more important, Fisher began his systematic approach to the analysis of real data as the springboard for the development of new statistical methods. He began to pay particular attention to the labour involved in the necessary computations performed by hand, and developed methods that were as practical as they were founded in rigour. In 1925, this work culminated in the publication of his first book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers. This went into many editions and translations in later years, and became a standard reference work for scientists in many disciplines.
A methodology for designing experiments was proposed by Ronald A. Fisher, in his innovative book The Design of Experiments (1935) which also became a standard. As an example, he described how to test the hypothesis that a certain lady could distinguish by flavour alone whether the milk or the tea was first placed in the cup. While this sounds like a frivolous application, it allowed him to illustrate the most important ideas of experimental design: see Lady tasting tea.
Agricultural science advances served to meet the combination of larger city populations and fewer farms. But for crop scientists to take due account of widely differing geographical growing climates and needs, it was important to differentiate local growing conditions. To extrapolate experiments on local crops to a national scale, they had to extend crop sample testing economically to overall populations. As statistical methods advanced (primarily the efficacy of designed experiments instead of one-factor-at-a-time experimentation), representative factorial design of experiments began to enable the meaningful extension, by inference, of experimental sampling results to the population as a whole. But it was hard to decide how representative was the crop sample chosen. Factorial design methodology showed how to estimate and correct for any random variation within the sample and also in the data collection procedures.
== Bayesian statistics ==

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The term Bayesian refers to Thomas Bayes (17021761), who proved that probabilistic limits could be placed on an unknown event. However it was Pierre-Simon Laplace (17491827) who introduced (as principle VI) what is now called Bayes' theorem and applied it to celestial mechanics, medical statistics, reliability, and jurisprudence. When insufficient knowledge was available to specify an informed prior, Laplace used uniform priors, according to his "principle of insufficient reason". Laplace assumed uniform priors for mathematical simplicity rather than for philosophical reasons. Laplace also introduced primitive versions of conjugate priors and the theorem of von Mises and Bernstein, according to which the posteriors corresponding to initially differing priors ultimately agree, as the number of observations increases. This early Bayesian inference, which used uniform priors following Laplace's principle of insufficient reason, was called "inverse probability" (because it infers backwards from observations to parameters, or from effects to causes).
After the 1920s, inverse probability was largely supplanted by a collection of methods that were developed by Ronald A. Fisher, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson. Their methods came to be called frequentist statistics. Fisher rejected the Bayesian view, writing that "the theory of inverse probability is founded upon an error, and must be wholly rejected". At the end of his life, however, Fisher expressed greater respect for the essay of Bayes, which Fisher believed to have anticipated his own, fiducial approach to probability; Fisher still maintained that Laplace's views on probability were "fallacious rubbish". Neyman started out as a "quasi-Bayesian", but subsequently developed confidence intervals (a key method in frequentist statistics) because "the whole theory would look nicer if it were built from the start without reference to Bayesianism and priors".
The word Bayesian appeared around 1950, and by the 1960s it became the term preferred by those dissatisfied with the limitations of frequentist statistics.
In the 20th century, the ideas of Laplace were further developed in two different directions, giving rise to objective and subjective currents in Bayesian practice. In the objectivist stream, the statistical analysis depends on only the model assumed and the data analysed. No subjective decisions need to be involved. In contrast, "subjectivist" statisticians deny the possibility of fully objective analysis for the general case.
In the further development of Laplace's ideas, subjective ideas predate objectivist positions. The idea that 'probability' should be interpreted as 'subjective degree of belief in a proposition' was proposed, for example, by John Maynard Keynes in the early 1920s. This idea was taken further by Bruno de Finetti in Italy (Fondamenti Logici del Ragionamento Probabilistico, 1930) and Frank Ramsey in Cambridge (The Foundations of Mathematics, 1931). The approach was devised to solve problems with the frequentist definition of probability but also with the earlier, objectivist approach of Laplace. The subjective Bayesian methods were further developed and popularized in the 1950s by L.J. Savage.
Objective Bayesian inference was further developed by Harold Jeffreys at the University of Cambridge. His book Theory of Probability first appeared in 1939 and played an important role in the revival of the Bayesian view of probability. In 1957, Edwin Jaynes promoted the concept of maximum entropy for constructing priors, which is an important principle in the formulation of objective methods, mainly for discrete problems. In 1965, Dennis Lindley's two-volume work "Introduction to Probability and Statistics from a Bayesian Viewpoint" brought Bayesian methods to a wide audience. In 1979, José-Miguel Bernardo introduced reference analysis, which offers a general applicable framework for objective analysis. Other well-known proponents of Bayesian probability theory include I.J. Good, B.O. Koopman, Howard Raiffa, Robert Schlaifer and Alan Turing.
In the 1980s, there was a dramatic growth in research and applications of Bayesian methods, mostly attributed to the discovery of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, which removed many of the computational problems, and an increasing interest in nonstandard, complex applications. Despite growth of Bayesian research, most undergraduate teaching is still based on frequentist statistics. Nonetheless, Bayesian methods are widely accepted and used, such as for example in the field of machine learning.
== Important contributors to statistics ==
== References ==
== Bibliography ==
Freedman, D. (1999). "From association to causation: Some remarks on the history of statistics". Statistical Science. 14 (3): 243258. doi:10.1214/ss/1009212409. (Revised version, 2002)
Hald, Anders (2003). A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-47129-5.
Hald, Anders (1998). A History of Mathematical Statistics from 1750 to 1930. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-17912-4.
Kotz, S., Johnson, N.L. (1992,1992,1997). Breakthroughs in Statistics, Vols I, II, III. Springer ISBN 0-387-94037-5, ISBN 0-387-94039-1, ISBN 0-387-94989-5
Pearson, Egon (1978). The History of Statistics in the 17th and 18th Centuries against the changing background of intellectual, scientific and religious thought (Lectures by Karl Pearson given at University College London during the academic sessions 1921-1933). New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc. p. 744. ISBN 978-0-02-850120-8.
Salsburg, David (2001). The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century. ISBN 0-7167-4106-7
Stigler, Stephen M. (1986). The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-40341-3.
Stigler, Stephen M. (1999) Statistics on the Table: The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-83601-4
David, H. A. (1995). "First (?) Occurrence of Common Terms in Mathematical Statistics". The American Statistician. 49 (2): 121133. doi:10.2307/2684625. JSTOR 2684625.
== External links ==
JEHPS: Recent publications in the history of probability and statistics
Electronic Journ@l for History of Probability and Statistics/Journ@l Electronique d'Histoire des Probabilités et de la Statistique
Figures from the History of Probability and Statistics (Univ. of Southampton)
Materials for the History of Statistics (Univ. of York)
Probability and Statistics on the Earliest Uses Pages (Univ. of Southampton)
Earliest Uses of Symbols in Probability and Statistics on Earliest Uses of Various Mathematical Symbols

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The history of technology is the history of human invention of tools and techniques. Technology includes methods ranging from simple stone tools to the complex genetic engineering and information technology that has emerged since the 1980s. The term technology comes from the Greek words techne, meaning art and craft, and logos, meaning word and speech. It was first used to describe applied arts, but it is now used to describe advancements and changes that affect the environment around us.
New knowledge has enabled people to create new tools. Conversely, many scientific endeavors are made possible by new technologies, such as scientific instruments that allow us to study nature in greater detail than our natural senses can.
Since much of technology is applied science, technical history is connected to the history of science. Since technology uses resources, technical history is tightly connected to economic history. From those resources, technology produces other resources, including technological artifacts used in everyday life. Technological change affects, and is affected by, a society's cultural traditions. It is a force for economic growth and a means of developing and projecting economic, political, and military power and wealth.
== Measuring technological progress ==
Many sociologists and anthropologists have created social theories dealing with social and cultural evolution. Some, such as Lewis H. Morgan, Leslie White, and Gerhard Lenski, have declared technological progress the primary factor driving the development of human civilization. Morgan's concept of three major stages of social evolution (savagery, barbarism, and civilization) can be divided by technological milestones, such as fire. White argued that the measure by which to judge the evolution of culture is energy.
For White, "the primary function of culture" is to "harness and control energy." White differentiates between five stages of human development: In the first, people use the energy of their own muscles. In the second, they use the energy of domesticated animals. In the third, they use plant energy (agricultural revolution). In the fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas. In the fifth, they harness nuclear energy. White introduced the formula P = E/T, where P is the development index, E is a measure of energy consumed, and T is a measure of the efficiency of technical factors in using the energy. In his own words, "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased". Nikolai Kardashev extrapolated his theory, creating the Kardashev scale, which categorizes the energy use of advanced civilizations.
Lenski's approach focuses on information. The more information and knowledge (especially the ability to shape the natural environment) a given society has, the more advanced it is. He identifies four stages of human development, based on advances in the history of communication. In the first stage, information is passed by genes. In the second, when humans gain sentience, they can learn and pass information through experience. In the third, the humans start using signs and develop logic. In the fourth, they can create symbols, develop language, and write. Advancements in communications technology translate into advancements in the economic system and political system, distribution of wealth, social inequality, and other spheres of social life. He also differentiates societies based on their level of technology, communication, and economy:
hunter-gatherer,
simple agricultural,
advanced agricultural,
industrial,
special (such as fishing societies).
In economics, productivity is a measure of technological progress. Productivity increases when fewer inputs (classically, labor and capital, though some measures include energy and materials) are used to produce a unit of output. Another indicator of technological progress is the development of new products and services, which is necessary to offset unemployment that would otherwise result from reduced labor inputs. In developed countries, productivity growth has been slowing since the late 1970s; however, it has been higher in some sectors, such as manufacturing. For example, employment in manufacturing in the United States declined from over 30% in the 1940s to just over 10% 70 years later. Similar changes occurred in other developed countries. This stage is referred to as post-industrial.
In the late 1970s sociologists and anthropologists like Alvin Toffler (author of Future Shock), Daniel Bell and John Naisbitt have approached the theories of post-industrial societies, arguing that the current era of industrial society is coming to an end, and services and information are becoming more important than industry and goods. Some extreme visions of post-industrial society, especially in fiction, are strikingly similar to visions of near- and post-singularity societies.
== By period and geography ==
The following is a summary of the history of technology by time period and geography:
=== Prehistory ===
==== Stone Age ====

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During most of the Paleolithic the bulk of the Stone Age all humans lived with limited tools and few permanent settlements. The first major technologies were tied to survival, hunting, and food preparation. Stone tools and weapons, fire, and clothing were major technological developments during this period.
Human ancestors have been using stone and other tools since long before the emergence of Homo sapiens approximately 300,000 years ago. The earliest direct evidence of tool usage was found in Ethiopia within the Great Rift Valley, dating back to 2.5 million years ago. The earliest methods of stone tool making, known as the Oldowan "industry", date back to at least 2.3 million years ago. This era of stone tool use is called the Paleolithic, or "Old stone age", and spans all of human history up to the development of agriculture approximately 12,000 years ago.
To make a stone tool, a "core" of hard stone with specific flaking properties (such as flint) was struck with a hammerstone. This flaking produced sharp edges which could be used as tools, primarily in the form of choppers or scrapers. These tools greatly aided the early humans in their hunter-gatherer lifestyle to perform a variety of tasks including butchering carcasses (and breaking bones to get at the marrow); chopping wood; cracking open nuts; skinning an animal for its hide, and even forming other tools out of softer materials such as bone and wood.
The earliest stone tools were irrelevant, being little more than a fractured rock. In the Acheulian era, beginning approximately 1.65 million years ago, methods of working these stones into specific shapes, such as hand axes emerged. This early Stone Age is described as the Lower Paleolithic.
The Middle Paleolithic, approximately 300,000 years ago, saw the introduction of the prepared-core technique, in which multiple blades could be rapidly produced from a single core stone. The Upper Paleolithic, beginning approximately 40,000 years ago, saw the introduction of pressure flaking, where a wood, bone, or antler punch could be used to shape a stone very finely.
The end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, is taken as the end point of the Upper Paleolithic and the beginning of the Epipaleolithic / Mesolithic. The Mesolithic technology included the use of microliths as composite stone tools, along with wood, bone, and antler tools.
The later Stone Age, during which the rudiments of agricultural technology were developed, is called the Neolithic period. During this period, polished stone tools were made from a variety of hard rocks such as flint, jade, jadeite, and greenstone, largely by working exposures as quarries, but later the valuable rocks were pursued by tunneling underground, the first steps in mining technology. The polished axes were used for forest clearance and the establishment of crop farming, and were so effective that they remained in use when bronze and iron appeared. These stone axes were used alongside a continued use of stone tools such as a range of projectiles, knives, and scrapers, as well as tools made from organic materials such as wood, bone, and antler.
Stone Age cultures developed music and engaged in organized warfare. Stone Age humans developed ocean-worthy outrigger canoe technology, leading to migration across the Malay Archipelago, across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar and also across the Pacific Ocean, which required knowledge of the ocean currents, weather patterns, sailing, and celestial navigation.
Although Paleolithic cultures left no written records, the shift from nomadic life to settlement and agriculture can be inferred from a range of archaeological evidence. Such evidence includes ancient tools, cave paintings, and other prehistoric art, such as the Venus of Willendorf. Human remains also provide direct evidence, both through the examination of bones and the study of mummies. Scientists and historians have drawn significant inferences about the lifestyles and cultures of various prehistoric peoples, especially their technology.
=== Ancient ===
==== Copper and Bronze Ages ====
Metallic copper occurs on the surface of weathered copper ore deposits, and copper was used before copper smelting was known. Copper smelting is believed to have originated when the technology of pottery kilns allowed sufficiently high temperatures. The concentration of various elements such as arsenic increases with depth in copper ore deposits, and smelting of these ores yields arsenical bronze, which can be sufficiently work hardened to be suitable for making tools.
Bronze is an alloy of copper with tin; the latter being found in relatively few deposits globally, led to a long time elapsing before true tin bronze became widespread. (See: Tin sources and trade in ancient times) Bronze was a major advancement over stone as a material for making tools, both because of its mechanical properties, such as strength and ductility, and because it could be cast in molds to make intricately shaped objects. Bronze significantly advanced shipbuilding technology with better tools and bronze nails. Bronze nails replaced the old method of attaching the hull's boards with a cord threaded through drilled holes. Better ships enabled long-distance trade and the advance of civilization.
This technological trend apparently began in the Fertile Crescent and spread outward over time. These developments were not, and still are not, universal. The three-age system does not accurately describe the technology history of groups outside of Eurasia, and does not apply at all in the case of some isolated populations, such as the Spinifex People, the Sentinelese, and various Amazonian tribes, which still make use of Stone Age technology, and have not developed agricultural or metal technology. These villages preserve traditional customs in the face of global modernity, exhibiting remarkable resistance to rapid technological advancement.
==== Iron Age ====

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Before iron smelting was developed, the only iron obtained was from meteorites, which are usually identified by having nickel content. Meteoric iron was rare and valuable, but was sometimes used to make tools and other implements, such as fish hooks.
The Iron Age involved the adoption of iron smelting technology. It generally replaced bronze and enabled the production of tools that were stronger, lighter, and cheaper to make than their bronze equivalents. The raw materials to make iron, such as ore and limestone, are far more abundant than copper and especially tin ores. Consequently, iron was produced in many areas.
It was not possible to mass-manufacture steel or pure iron because of the high temperatures required. Furnaces could reach melting temperature, but the crucibles and molds needed for melting and casting had not been developed. Steel could be produced by forging bloomery iron to reduce the carbon content in a somewhat controllable way, but steel produced by this method was not homogeneous. In many Eurasian cultures, the Iron Age was the last major step before the development of writing, though this was not universally the case.
In Europe, large hill forts were built either as refuges in times of war or as permanent settlements. In some cases, existing Bronze Age forts were expanded. The pace of land clearance using the more effective iron axes increased, providing more farmland to support the growing population.
==== Mesopotamia ====
Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and its peoples (Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians) lived in cities from c. 4000 BC, and developed a sophisticated architecture in mud-brick and stone, including the use of the true arch. The walls of Babylon were so massive that they were quoted as a Wonder of the World. They developed extensive water systems; canals for transport and irrigation in the alluvial south, and catchment systems stretching for tens of kilometers in the hilly north. Their palaces had sophisticated drainage systems.
Writing was invented in Mesopotamia, using the cuneiform script. Many records on clay tablets and stone inscriptions have survived. These civilizations were early adopters of bronze technologies, which they used for tools, weapons, and monumental statuary. By 1200 BC, they could cast objects 5 m long in a single piece.
Several of the six classic simple machines were invented in Mesopotamia. Mesopotamians have been credited with the invention of the wheel. The wheel and axle mechanism first appeared with the potter's wheel, invented in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) during the 5th millennium BC. This led to the invention of the wheeled vehicle in Mesopotamia during the early 4th millennium BC. Depictions of wheeled wagons found on clay tablet pictographs at the Eanna district of Uruk are dated between 3700 and 3500 BC. The lever was used in the shadoof water-lifting device, the first crane machine, which appeared in Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC, and then in ancient Egyptian technology circa 2000 BC. The earliest evidence of pulleys date back to Mesopotamia in the early 2nd millennium BC.
The screw, the last of the simple machines to be invented, first appeared in Mesopotamia during the Neo-Assyrian period (911609) BC. The Assyrian King Sennacherib (704681 BC) claims to have invented automatic sluices and to have been the first to use water screw pumps, of up to 30 tons weight, which were cast using two-part clay molds rather than by the 'lost wax' process. The Jerwan Aqueduct (c. 688 BC) is made with stone arches and lined with waterproof concrete.
The Babylonian astronomical diaries spanned 800 years. They enabled meticulous astronomers to plot the motions of the planets and to predict eclipses.
The earliest evidence of water wheels and watermills date back to the ancient Near East in the 4th century BC, specifically in the Persian Empire before 350 BC, in the regions of Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Persia (Iran). This pioneering use of water power constituted the first human-devised motive force not to rely on muscle power (besides the sail).

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==== Egypt ====
The Egyptians, known for building pyramids centuries before the advent of modern tools, invented and used many simple machines, such as the ramp, to aid construction. Historians and archaeologists have found evidence that the pyramids were built using three of the Six Simple Machines, from which all machines are based. These machines are the inclined plane, the wedge, and the lever, which allowed the ancient Egyptians to move millions of limestone blocks which weighed approximately 3.5 tons (7,000 lbs.) each into place to create structures like the Great Pyramid of Giza, which is 481 feet (147 meters) high.
They also made writing medium similar to paper from papyrus, which Joshua Mark states is the foundation for modern paper. Papyrus is a plant (Cyperus papyrus) that grew in plentiful amounts in the Egyptian Delta and throughout the Nile River Valley during ancient times. The papyrus was harvested by field workers and brought to processing centers, where it was cut into thin strips. The strips were then laid out side by side and covered in plant resin. The second layer of strips was laid perpendicular to the first, then both were pressed together until the sheet was dry. The sheets were then joined to form a roll, which was later used for writing.
Egyptian society made several significant advances during the dynastic periods in many areas of technology. According to Hossam Elanzeery, they were the first civilization to use timekeeping devices such as sundials, shadow clocks, and obelisks. They successfully leveraged their knowledge of astronomy to create a calendar model that society still uses today. They developed shipbuilding technology that enabled them to progress from papyrus-reed vessels to cedar-wood ships, while also pioneering the use of rope trusses and stem-mounted rudders. The Egyptians also used their knowledge of anatomy to lay the foundation for many modern medical techniques and to practice the earliest known form of neuroscience. Elanzeery also states that they used advanced mathematical science, as evidenced by the construction of the pyramids.
Ancient Egyptians also pioneered many food technologies that form the basis of modern food processing. Based on paintings and reliefs found in tombs, as well as archaeological artifacts, scholars like Paul T Nicholson believe that the Ancient Egyptians established systematic farming practices, engaged in cereal processing, brewed beer and baked bread, processed meat, practiced viticulture and created the basis for modern wine production, and created condiments to complement, preserve and mask the flavors of their food.
==== Indus Valley ====
The Indus Valley Civilization, situated in a resource-rich region (in modern Pakistan and northwestern India), is notable for its early use of city planning, sanitation technologies, and plumbing. Indus Valley construction and architecture, called 'Vaastu Shastra', suggests a thorough understanding of materials engineering, hydrology, and sanitation.
==== China ====
The Chinese made many first-known discoveries and developments. Major technological contributions from China include the earliest known form of the binary code and epigenetic sequencing, early seismological detectors, matches, paper, Helicopter rotor, Raised-relief map, the double-action piston pump, cast iron, water powered blast furnace bellows, the iron plough, the multi-tube seed drill, the wheelbarrow, the parachute, the compass, the rudder, the crossbow, the South Pointing Chariot and gunpowder. China also developed deep-well drilling, which it used to extract brine for making salt. Some of these wells, which were as deep as 900 meters, produced natural gas used to evaporate brine.
Other Chinese discoveries and inventions from the medieval period include block printing, movable-type printing, phosphorescent paint, the endless power chain drive, and the clock escapement mechanism. The solid-fuel rocket was invented in China about 1150, nearly 200 years after the invention of gunpowder (which acted as the rocket's fuel). Decades before the West's age of exploration, the Chinese emperors of the Ming Dynasty also sent large fleets on maritime voyages, some of which reached Africa.

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==== Hellenistic Mediterranean ====
The Hellenistic period of Mediterranean history began in the 4th century BC with Alexander's conquests, which led to the emergence of a Hellenistic civilization representing a synthesis of Greek and Near-Eastern cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean region, including the Balkans, Levant and Egypt. With Ptolemaic Egypt as its intellectual center and Greek as the lingua franca, the Hellenistic civilization included Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, Persian, and Phoenician scholars and engineers who wrote in Greek.
Hellenistic engineers of the Eastern Mediterranean were responsible for several inventions and improvements to existing technology. The Hellenistic period saw a sharp increase in technological advancement, fostered by a climate of openness to new ideas, the blossoming of a mechanistic philosophy, and the establishment of the Library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt and its close association with the adjacent museion. In contrast to the typically anonymous inventors of earlier ages, ingenious minds such as Archimedes, Philo of Byzantium, Heron, Ctesibius, and Archytas remain known by name to posterity.
Ancient agriculture, as in any period before the modern age the primary mode of production and subsistence, and its irrigation methods, were considerably advanced by the invention and widespread application of several previously unknown water-lifting devices, such as the vertical water-wheel, the compartmented wheel, the water turbine, Archimedes' screw, the bucket-chain and pot-garland, the force pump, the suction pump, the double-action piston pump and quite possibly the chain pump.
In music, the water organ, invented by Ctesibius and subsequently improved, constituted the earliest instance of a keyboard instrument. In time-keeping, the introduction of the inflow clepsydra and its mechanization by the dial and pointer, the application of a feedback system, and the escapement mechanism far superseded the earlier outflow clepsydra.
Innovations in mechanical technology included the newly devised right-angled gear, which would become particularly important to the operation of mechanical devices. Hellenistic engineers also devised automata such as suspended ink pots, automatic washstands, and doors, primarily as toys, which, however, featured new useful mechanisms such as the cam and gimbals.
The Antikythera mechanism, a kind of analogous computer working with a differential gear, and the astrolabe both show great refinement in astronomical science.
In other fields, ancient Greek innovations include the catapult and the gastraphetes crossbow in warfare, hollow bronze-casting in metallurgy, the dioptra for surveying, in infrastructure the lighthouse, central heating, a tunnel excavated from both ends by scientific calculations, and the ship trackway. In transport, great progress was made with the invention of the winch and the odometer.
Further newly created techniques and items were spiral staircases, the chain drive, sliding calipers, and showers.
==== Roman Empire ====
The Roman Empire expanded from Italia across the entire Mediterranean region between the 1st century BC and 1st century AD. Its most advanced and economically productive provinces outside of Italia were the Eastern Roman provinces in the Balkans, Asia Minor, Egypt, and the Levant, with Roman Egypt in particular being the wealthiest Roman province outside of Italia.
The Roman Empire developed an intensive and sophisticated agriculture, expanded upon existing iron working technology, created laws providing for individual ownership, advanced stone masonry technology, advanced road-building (exceeded only in the 19th century), military engineering, civil engineering, spinning and weaving and several different machines like the Gallic reaper that helped to increase productivity in many sectors of the Roman economy. Roman engineers were the first to build monumental arches, amphitheatres, aqueducts, public baths, true arch bridges, harbours, reservoirs and dams, vaults and domes on a very large scale across their Empire. Notable Roman inventions include the book (Codex), glass blowing, and concrete. Because Rome was located on a volcanic peninsula with sand containing suitable crystalline grains, the concrete the Romans formulated was especially durable. Some of their buildings have lasted 2000 years, to the present day.
In Roman Egypt, the inventor Hero of Alexandria was the first to experiment with a wind-powered mechanical device (see Heron's windwheel) and even created the earliest steam-powered device (the aeolipile), opening up new possibilities in harnessing natural forces. He also devised a vending machine. However, his inventions were primarily toys, rather than practical machines.
==== Inca, Maya, and Aztec ====
The engineering skills of the Inca and Maya were great, even by today's standards. An example of this exceptional engineering is the use of pieces weighing upwards of one ton in their stonework, placed together so that not even a blade can fit into the cracks. Inca villages used irrigation canals and drainage systems, making agriculture very efficient. While some claim that the Incas were the first inventors of hydroponics, their agricultural technology was still soil-based, if advanced.
Though the Maya civilization did not incorporate metallurgy or wheel technology into their architecture, they developed complex writing and astronomical systems and created beautiful sculptural works in stone and flint. Like the Inca, the Maya also had command of fairly advanced agricultural and construction technology. The Maya are also responsible for creating the first pressurized water system in Mesoamerica, located in the Maya site of Palenque.
The main contribution of the Aztec rule was a system of communication between the conquered cities and the widespread use of the ingenious agricultural technology of chinampas. In Mesoamerica, without draft animals for transport (nor, as a result, wheeled vehicles), the roads were designed for travel on foot, just as in the Inca and Mayan civilizations. The Aztec, subsequently to the Maya, inherited many of the technologies and intellectual advancements of their predecessors: the Olmec (see Native American inventions and innovations).
=== Medieval to early modern ===
One of the most significant developments of the medieval period was the rise of economies in which water and wind power were more important than animal and human muscle power. Most water and wind power was used for milling grain. Water power was also used to blow air into blast furnace, to pulp rags for papermaking, and to felt wool. The Domesday Book recorded 5,624 water mills in Great Britain in 1086, being about one per thirty families.

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==== East Asia ====
==== Indian subcontinent ====
==== Islamic world ====
The Muslim caliphates united large areas that had previously traded little with one another, including the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, the Iberian Peninsula, and parts of the Indian subcontinent. The science and technology of earlier empires in the region, including the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman empires, were inherited by the Muslim world, where Arabic replaced Syriac, Persian, and Greek as the region's lingua franca. Significant advances were made in the region during the Islamic Golden Age (8th16th centuries).
The Arab Agricultural Revolution occurred during this period. It was a transformation in agriculture from the 8th to the 13th century in the Islamic region of the Old World. The economy established by Arab and other Muslim traders across the Old World enabled the diffusion of many crops and farming techniques throughout the Islamic world, as well as the adaptation of crops and techniques from and to regions outside it. Advances were made in animal husbandry, irrigation, and farming, with the help of new technology such as the windmill. These changes made agriculture much more productive, supporting population growth, urbanisation, and greater social stratification.
Muslim engineers in the Islamic world made extensive use of hydropower, as well as early uses of tidal power and wind power. fossil fuels such as petroleum, and large factory complexes (tiraz in Arabic). A variety of industrial mills were employed in the Islamic world, including fulling mills, gristmills, hullers, sawmills, ship mills, stamp mills, steel mills, and tide mills. By the 11th century, every province throughout the Islamic world had these industrial mills in operation. Muslim engineers also employed water turbines and gears in mills and water-raising machines, and pioneered the use of dams as a source of water power, used to provide additional power to watermills and water-raising machines. Many of these technologies were transferred to medieval Europe.
Wind-powered machines used to grind grain and pump water, the windmill and wind pump, first appeared in what are now Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan by the 9th century. They were used to grind grains and draw up water, and used in the gristmilling and sugarcane industries. Sugar mills first appeared in the medieval Islamic world. They were first driven by watermills, and then windmills from the 9th and 10th centuries in what are today Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Crops such as almonds and citrus fruit were brought to Europe through Al-Andalus, and sugar cultivation was gradually adopted across Europe. Arab merchants dominated trade in the Indian Ocean until the arrival of the Portuguese in the 16th century.
The Muslim world adopted papermaking from China. The earliest paper mills appeared in Abbasid-era Baghdad during 794795. The knowledge of gunpowder was also transmitted from China via predominantly Islamic countries, where formulas for pure potassium nitrate were developed.
The spinning wheel was invented in the Islamic world by the early 11th century. It was later widely adopted in Europe, where it was adapted into the spinning jenny, a key device during the Industrial Revolution. The crankshaft was invented by Al-Jazari in 1206, and is central to modern machinery such as the steam engine, internal combustion engine and automatic controls. The camshaft was also first described by Al-Jazari in 1206.
Early programmable machines were also invented in the Muslim world. The first music sequencer, a programmable musical instrument, was an automated flute player invented by the Banu Musa brothers and described in their Book of Ingenious Devices in the 9th century. In 1206, Al-Jazari invented programmable automata/robots. He described four automaton musicians, including two drummers operated by a programmable drum machine, each capable of playing different rhythms and drum patterns. The castle clock, a hydropowered mechanical astronomical clock invented by Al-Jazari, was an early programmable analog computer.
In the Ottoman Empire, a practical impulse steam turbine was invented in 1551 by Taqi ad-Din Muhammad ibn Ma'ruf in Ottoman Egypt. He described a method for rotating a spit using a jet of steam acting on rotary vanes around the periphery of a wheel. Known as a steam jack, a similar device for rotating a spit was also later described by John Wilkins in 1648.
==== Medieval Europe ====
While medieval technology has long been depicted as a step backward in the evolution of Western technology, a generation of medievalists (such as the American historian of science Lynn White) stressed, from the 1940s onwards, the innovative character of many medieval techniques. Genuine medieval contributions include, for example, mechanical clocks, spectacles, and vertical windmills. Medieval ingenuity was also displayed in the invention of seemingly inconspicuous items such as the watermark and the functional button. In navigation, the foundation to the subsequent Age of Discovery was laid by the introduction of pintle-and-gudgeon rudders, lateen sails, the dry compass, the horseshoe, and the astrolabe.
Significant advances were also made in military technology with the development of plate armour, steel crossbows and cannons. The Middle Ages are perhaps best known for their architectural heritage: While the invention of the rib vault and pointed arch gave rise to the high rising Gothic style, the ubiquitous medieval fortifications gave the era the almost proverbial title of the 'age of castles'.
Papermaking, a 2nd-century Chinese technology, was carried to the Middle East when a group of Chinese papermakers was captured in the 8th century. Papermaking technology was spread to Europe by the Umayyad conquest of Hispania. A paper mill was established in Sicily in the 12th century. In Europe, the fiber to make pulp for making paper was obtained from linen and cotton rags. Lynn Townsend White Jr. credited the spinning wheel with increasing the supply of rags, which led to cheap paper, which was a factor in the development of printing.
==== Renaissance technology ====

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Before the development of modern engineering, mathematics was used by artisans and craftsmen, such as millwrights, clock makers, instrument makers, and surveyors. Aside from these professions, universities were not believed to have had much practical significance to technology.
A standard reference for the state of the mechanical arts during the Renaissance is the mining engineering treatise De re metallica (1556), which also contains sections on geology, mining, and chemistry. De re metallica was the standard chemistry reference for the next 180 years. Among the water-powered mechanical devices in use were ore stamping mills, forge hammers, blast bellows, and suction pumps.
Due to the casting of cannon, the blast furnace came into widespread use in France in the mid-15th century. The blast furnace had been used in China since the 4th century BC.
The invention of the movable cast metal type printing press, whose pressing mechanism was adapted from an olive screw press, (c. 1441) lead to a tremendous increase in the number of books and the number of titles published. Movable ceramic type had been used in China for a few centuries and woodblock printing dated back even further.
The era is marked by such profound technical advancements as linear perspective, double-shell domes, and Bastion fortress. Notebooks of the Renaissance artist-engineers such as Taccola and Leonardo da Vinci give a deep insight into the mechanical technology then known and applied. Architects and engineers were inspired by the structures of Ancient Rome, and men like Brunelleschi created the large dome of Florence Cathedral as a result. He was awarded one of the first patents ever issued to protect an ingenious crane he designed to raise the large masonry stones to the top of the structure. Military technology developed rapidly with the widespread use of the cross-bow and ever more powerful artillery, as the city-states of Italy were usually in conflict with one another. Powerful families like the Medici were strong patrons of the arts and sciences. Renaissance science spawned the Scientific Revolution; science and technology began a cycle of mutual advancement.
==== Age of Exploration ====
An improved sailing ship, the nau or carrack, enabled the Age of Exploration with the European colonization of the Americas, epitomized by Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. Pioneers like Vasco da Gama, Cabral, Magellan, and Christopher Columbus explored the world in search of new trade routes for their goods and contacts with Africa, India, and China to shorten the journey compared with traditional routes overland. They produced new maps and charts which enabled mariners to explore further with greater confidence. Navigation was generally difficult, however, owing to the problem of longitude and the absence of accurate chronometers. European powers rediscovered the idea of the civil code, which had been lost since the time of the Ancient Greeks.
==== PreIndustrial Revolution ====
The stocking frame, which was invented in 1598, increased a knitter's number of knots per minute from 100 to 1000.
Mines were becoming increasingly deep and expensive to drain with horse-powered bucket-and-chain pumps and wooden piston pumps. Some mines used as many as 500 horses. Horse-powered pumps were replaced by the Savery steam pump (1698) and the Newcomen steam engine (1712).
=== Industrial Revolution (17601830s) ===
The revolution was driven by cheap energy in the form of coal, produced in ever-increasing amounts from the abundant resources of Britain. The British Industrial Revolution is characterized by developments in textile machinery, mining, metallurgy, transport, and the invention of machine tools.
Before the invention of machinery to spin yarn and weave cloth, spinning was done using the spinning wheel, and weaving was done on a hand-and-foot-operated loom. It took from three to five spinners to supply one weaver. The invention of the flying shuttle in 1733 doubled the output of a weaver, creating a shortage of spinners. The spinning frame for wool was invented in 1738. The spinning jenny, invented in 1764, was a machine that used multiple spinning wheels; however, it produced low-quality thread. The water frame patented by Richard Arkwright in 1767 produced a better quality thread than the spinning jenny. The spinning mule, patented in 1779 by Samuel Crompton, produced a high-quality thread. The power loom was invented by Edmund Cartwright in 1787.
In the mid-1750s, the steam engine was applied to the water-power-constrained iron, copper, and lead industries to power blast bellows. These industries were located near the mines, some of which used steam engines for pumping. Steam engines were too powerful for leather bellows, so cast-iron blowing cylinders were developed in 1768. Steam-powered blast furnaces reached higher temperatures, allowing the use of more lime in the iron blast-furnace feed. (Lime-rich slag was not free-flowing at the previously used temperatures.) With a sufficient lime ratio, sulfur from coal or coke fuel reacts with the slag so that the sulfur does not contaminate the iron. Coal and coke were cheaper and more abundant fuels. As a result, iron production rose significantly during the last decades of the 18th century. Coal converted to coke fueled higher temperature blast furnaces and produced cast iron in much larger amounts than before, allowing the creation of a range of structures such as The Iron Bridge. Cheap coal meant that industry was no longer constrained by water resources that drove the mills, although water remained a valuable source of power.

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The steam engine helped drain the mines, allowing access to more coal reserves and increasing coal output. The development of the high-pressure steam engine made locomotives possible; a transport revolution followed. The steam engine which had existed since the early 18th century, was practically applied to both steamboat and railway transportation. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first purpose-built railway line, opened in 1830, with the Rocket locomotive of Robert Stephenson among its first working locomotives.
Manufacture of ships' pulley blocks by all-metal machines at the Portsmouth Block Mills in 1803 instigated the age of sustained mass production. Machine tools used by engineers to manufacture parts began in the first decade of the century, notably by Richard Roberts and Joseph Whitworth. The development of interchangeable parts through what is now called the American system of manufacturing began in the firearms industry at the U.S. Federal arsenals in the early 19th century; it became widely used by the end of the century.
Until the Enlightenment era, little progress was made in water supply and sanitation, and the engineering skills of the Romans were largely neglected throughout Europe. The first documented use of sand filters to purify the water supply dates to 1804, when the owner of a bleachery in Paisley, Scotland, John Gibb, installed an experimental filter and sold his unwanted surplus to the public. The first treated public water supply in the world was installed by engineer James Simpson for the Chelsea Waterworks Company in London in 1829. The first screw-down water tap was patented in 1845 by Guest and Chrimes, a brass foundry in Rotherham. The practice of water treatment soon became mainstream, and the virtues of the system were made starkly apparent after the investigations of the physician John Snow during the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak demonstrated the role of the water supply in spreading the cholera epidemic.
=== Second Industrial Revolution (1860s1914) ===
The 19th century saw astonishing developments in transportation, construction, manufacturing, and communication technologies originating in Europe. After a recession at the end of the 1830s and a general slowdown in major inventions, the Second Industrial Revolution was a period of rapid innovation and industrialization that began in the 1860s, around 1870, and lasted until World War I. It included the rapid development of chemical, electrical, petroleum, and steel technologies, connected to highly structured technological research.
Telegraphy developed into a practical technology in the 19th century to help run the railways safely. Along with the development of telegraphy was the patenting of the first telephone. March 1876 marks the date that Alexander Graham Bell officially patented his version of an "electric telegraph". Although Bell is noted with the creation of the telephone, it is still debated about who actually developed the first working model.
Building on improvements in vacuum pumps and materials research, incandescent light bulbs became practical for general use in the late 1870s. Edison Electric Illuminating Company, founded by Thomas Edison with financial backing from Spencer Trask, built and managed the first electric power network. Electrification was rated the most important technical development of the 20th century as the foundational infrastructure for modern civilization. This invention had a profound effect on the workplace because factories could now have second and third shift workers.
Shoe production was mechanized during the mid 19th century. Mass production of sewing machines and agricultural machinery such as reapers occurred in the mid to late 19th century. Bicycles were mass-produced beginning in the 1880s.
Steam-powered factories became widespread, although the conversion from water power to steam occurred in England earlier than in the U.S. Ironclad warships were found in battle starting in the 1860s, and played a role in the opening of Japan and China to trade with the West.
Between 1825 and 1840, photography was introduced. For much of the rest of the century, many engineers and inventors tried to combine it and the much older technique of projection to create a complete illusion or a complete documentation of reality. Color photography was usually included in these ambitions, and the introduction of the phonograph in 1877 seemed to promise the addition of synchronized sound recordings. Between 1887 and 1894, the first successful short cinematographic presentations were established.
=== 20th century ===

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Mass production brought automobiles and other high-tech goods to the masses of consumers. Military research and development sped advances including electronic computing and jet engines. Radio and telephony greatly improved and expanded their reach to larger user populations. However, near-universal access would not be possible until mobile phones became affordable to residents of the developing world in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Energy and engine technology improvements included nuclear power, developed after the Manhattan Project, which heralded the new Atomic Age. Rocket development led to long range missiles and the first space age that lasted from the 1950s with the launch of Sputnik to the mid-1980s.
Electrification spread rapidly in the 20th century. At the beginning of the century, electric power was, for the most part, only available to wealthy people in a few major cities. By 2019, an estimated 87 percent of the world's population had access to electricity.
Birth control also became widespread during the 20th century. Electron microscopes were very powerful by the late 1970s, and genetic theory and knowledge were expanding, leading to developments in genetic engineering.
The first "test tube baby" Louise Brown was born in 1978, which led to the first successful gestational surrogacy pregnancy in 1985 and the first pregnancy by ICSI in 1991, which is the implanting of a single sperm into an egg. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis was first performed in late 1989 and led to successful births in July 1990. These procedures have become relatively common.
Computers were connected by means of local area, telecom and fiber optic networks, powered by the optical amplifier that ushered in the Information Age. This optical networking technology exploded the capacity of the Internet beginning in 1996 with the launch of the first high-capacity wave division multiplexing (WDM) system by Ciena Corp. WDM, as the common basis for telecom backbone networks, increased transmission capacity by orders of magnitude, thus enabling the mass commercialization and popularization of the Internet and its widespread impact on culture, economics, business, and society.
The commercial availability of the first portable cell phone in 1981 and the first pocket-sized phone in 1985, both developed by Comvik in Sweden, coupled with the first transmission of data over a cellular network by Vodafone (formerly Racal-Millicom) in 1992, were the breakthroughs that led directly to the form and function of smartphones today. By 2014, the global total of mobile-cellular subscriptions had nearly reached parity with the world's human population and the Supreme Court of the United States of America has ruled that a mobile phone was a private part of a person. Providing consumers with wireless access to each other and to the Internet, the mobile phone stimulated one of the most important technology revolutions in human history.
The Human Genome Project sequenced and identified all three billion chemical units in human DNA to find the genetic roots of disease and develop treatments. The project became feasible due to two technical advances in the late 1970s: gene mapping using restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) markers and DNA sequencing. Sequencing was invented by Frederick Sanger and, separately, by Dr. Walter Gilbert. Gilbert also conceived of the Human Genome Project on May 27, 1985, and first publicly advocated it at the first International Conference on Genes and Computers in August 1985. The U.S. Federal Government sponsored the Human Genome Project, which began on October 1, 1990, and was declared complete in 2003.
The massive data analysis resources necessary for running transatlantic research programs such as the Human Genome Project and the Large ElectronPositron Collider led to a necessity for distributed communications, causing Internet protocols to be more widely adopted by researchers and also creating a justification for Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web.
Vaccination spread rapidly to the developing world from the 1980s onward due to many successful humanitarian initiatives, greatly reducing childhood mortality in many poor countries with limited medical resources.
The US National Academy of Engineering, by expert vote, established the following ranking of the most important technological developments of the 20th century:
=== 21st century ===
In the early 21st century, research is ongoing into quantum computers, gene therapy (introduced 1990), 3D printing (introduced 1981), nanotechnology (introduced 1985), bioengineering/biotechnology, nuclear technology, advanced materials (e.g., graphene), the scramjet and drones (along with railguns and high-energy laser beams for military uses), superconductivity, the memristor, and green technologies such as alternative fuels (e.g., fuel cells, self-driving electric and plug-in hybrid cars), augmented reality devices and wearable electronics, artificial intelligence, and more efficient and powerful LEDs, solar cells, integrated circuits, wireless power devices, engines, and batteries.
Large Hadron Collider, the largest single machine ever built, was constructed between 1998 and 2008. The understanding of particle physics is expected to expand with better instruments including larger particle accelerators such as the LHC and better neutrino detectors. Dark matter is sought via underground detectors and observatories like LIGO have started to detect gravitational waves.
Genetic engineering technology continues to improve, and the importance of epigenetics on development and inheritance has also become increasingly recognized.
New spaceflight technology and spacecraft are also being developed, like the Boeing's Orion and SpaceX's Dragon 2. New, more capable space telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which was launched to orbit in December, 2021, and the Extremely Large Telescope, have been designed. The International Space Station was completed in the 2000s, and NASA and ESA plan a human mission to Mars in the 2030s. The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) is an electro-magnetic thruster for spacecraft propulsion and is expected to be tested in 2015.
The Breakthrough Initiatives project plans to send the first ever spacecraft to visit another star, which will consist of numerous super-light chips driven by Electric propulsion in the 2030s, and receive images of the Proxima Centauri system, along with, possibly, the potentially habitable planet Proxima Centauri b, by midcentury.
2004 saw the first crewed commercial spaceflight when Mike Melvill crossed the boundary of space on June 21, 2004.
== By type ==

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=== Biotechnology ===
Timeline of agriculture and food technology
Timeline of biotechnology
=== Civil engineering ===
Civil engineering
Architecture and building construction
Bridges, harbors, tunnels, dams
Surveying, instruments and maps, cartography, urban engineering, water supply and sewerage
=== Communication ===
=== Computing ===
=== Consumer technology ===
=== Electrical engineering ===
Timeline of electrical and electronic engineering
=== Energy ===
=== Materials science ===
Timeline of materials technology
Metallurgy
=== Measurement ===
History of time in the United States
History of timekeeping devices
=== Medicine ===
=== Military ===
Military history#Technological evolution
Category:Military history articles on history of specific technologies
=== Nuclear ===
Manhattan Project
Atomic Age
Nuclear testing
Nuclear arms race
=== Science and technology ===
=== Transport ===
== See also ==
=== Related history ===
=== Related disciplines ===
=== Related subjects ===
== References ==
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
Electropaedia on the History of Technology Archived 2011-05-12 at the Wayback Machine
MIT 6.933J The Structure of Engineering Revolutions. From MIT OpenCourseWare, course materials (graduate level) for a course on the history of technology through a Thomas Kuhn-ian lens.
Concept of Civilization Events. From Jaroslaw Kessler, a chronology of "civilizing events".
Ancient and Medieval City Technology
Society for the History of Technology
Giants of Science (website of the Institute of National Remembrance)

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The history of telecommunication began with the use of smoke signals and drums in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In the 1790s, the first fixed semaphore systems emerged in Europe. However, it was not until the 1830s that electrical telecommunication systems started to appear. This article details the history of telecommunication and the individuals who helped make telecommunication systems what they are today. The history of telecommunication is an important part of the larger history of communication.
== Ancient systems and optical telegraphy ==
Early telecommunications included smoke signals and drums. Talking drums were used by natives in Africa, and smoke signals in North America and China. These systems were often used to do more than announce the presence of a military camp.
In Rabbinical Judaism a signal was given by means of kerchiefs or flags at intervals along the way back to the high priest to indicate the goat "for Azazel" had been pushed from the cliff.
Homing pigeons have occasionally been used throughout history by different cultures. Pigeon post had Persian roots, and was later used by the Romans to aid their military.
Greek hydraulic semaphore systems were used as early as the 4th century BC. The hydraulic semaphores, which worked with water filled vessels and visual signals, functioned as optical telegraphs. However, they could only utilize a very limited range of pre-determined messages, and as with all such optical telegraphs could only be deployed during good visibility conditions.
During the Middle Ages, chains of beacons were commonly used on hilltops as a means of relaying a signal. Beacon chains suffered the drawback that they could only pass a single bit of information, so the meaning of the message such as "the enemy has been sighted" had to be agreed upon in advance. One notable instance of their use was during the Spanish Armada, when a beacon chain relayed a signal from Plymouth to London that signaled the arrival of the Spanish warships.
In 1774, the Swiss physicist Georges Lesage built an electrostatic telegraph consisting of a set of 24 conductive wires a few meters long connected to 24 elder balls suspended from a silk thread (each wire corresponds to a letter). The electrification of a wire by means of an electrostatic generator causes the corresponding elder ball to deflect and designate a letter to the operator located at the end of the line. The sequence of selected letters leads to the writing and transmission of a message.
French engineer Claude Chappe began working on visual telegraphy in 1790, using pairs of "clocks" whose hands pointed at different symbols. These did not prove quite viable at long distances, and Chappe revised his model to use two sets of jointed wooden beams. Operators moved the beams using cranks and wires. He built his first telegraph line between Lille and Paris, followed by a line from Strasbourg to Paris. In 1794, a Swedish engineer, Abraham Edelcrantz built a quite different system from Stockholm to Drottningholm. As opposed to Chappe's system which involved pulleys rotating beams of wood, Edelcrantz's system relied only upon shutters and was therefore faster.
However, semaphore as a communication system suffered from the need for skilled operators and expensive towers often at intervals of only ten to thirty kilometers (six to nineteen miles). As a result, the last commercial line was abandoned in 1880.
== Electrical telegraph ==

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Experiments on communication with electricity, initially unsuccessful, started in about 1726. Scientists including Laplace, Ampère, and Gauss were involved.
An early experiment in electrical telegraphy was an 'electrochemical' telegraph created by the German physician, anatomist and inventor Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring in 1809, based on an earlier, less robust design of 1804 by Spanish polymath and scientist Francisco Salva Campillo. Both their designs employed multiple wires (up to 35) in order to visually represent almost all Latin letters and numerals. Thus, messages could be conveyed electrically up to a few kilometers (in von Sömmerring's design), with each of the telegraph receiver's wires immersed in a separate glass tube of acid. An electric current was sequentially applied by the sender through the various wires representing each digit of a message; at the recipient's end the currents electrolysed the acid in the tubes in sequence, releasing streams of hydrogen bubbles next to each associated letter or numeral. The telegraph receiver's operator would visually observe the bubbles and could then record the transmitted message, albeit at a very low baud rate. The principal disadvantage to the system was its prohibitive cost, due to having to manufacture and string-up the multiple wire circuits it employed, as opposed to the single wire (with ground return) used by later telegraphs.
The first working telegraph was built by Francis Ronalds in 1816 and used static electricity.
Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke patented a five-needle, six-wire system, which entered commercial use in 1838. It used the deflection of needles to represent messages and started operating over twenty-one kilometres (thirteen miles) of the Great Western Railway on 9 April 1839. Both Wheatstone and Cooke viewed their device as "an improvement to the [existing] electromagnetic telegraph" not as a new device.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Samuel Morse developed a version of the electrical telegraph which he demonstrated on 2 September 1837. Alfred Vail saw this demonstration and joined Morse to develop the register—a telegraph terminal that integrated a logging device for recording messages to paper tape. This was demonstrated successfully over three miles (five kilometres) on 6 January 1838 and eventually over forty miles (sixty-four kilometres) between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore on 24 May 1844. The patented invention proved lucrative and by 1851 telegraph lines in the United States spanned over 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometres). Morse's most important technical contribution to this telegraph was the simple and highly efficient Morse Code, co-developed with Vail, which was an important advance over Wheatstone's more complicated and expensive system, and required just two wires. The communications efficiency of the Morse Code preceded that of the Huffman code in digital communications by over 100 years, but Morse and Vail developed the code purely empirically, with shorter codes for more frequent letters.
The submarine cable across the English Channel, wire coated in gutta percha, was laid in 1851. Transatlantic cables installed in 1857 and 1858 only operated for a few days or weeks (carried messages of greeting back and forth between James Buchanan and Queen Victoria) before they failed. The project to lay a replacement line was delayed for five years by the American Civil War. The first successful transatlantic telegraph cable was completed on 27 July 1866, allowing continuous transatlantic telecommunication for the first time.
== Telephone ==
The electric telephone was invented in the 1870s, based on earlier work with harmonic (multi-signal) telegraphs. The first commercial telephone services were set up in 1878 and 1879 on both sides of the Atlantic in the cities of New Haven, Connecticut in the US and London, England in the UK. Alexander Graham Bell held the master patent for the telephone that was needed for such services in both countries. All other patents for electric telephone devices and features flowed from this master patent. Credit for the invention of the electric telephone has been frequently disputed, and new controversies over the issue have arisen from time-to-time. As with other great inventions such as radio, television, the light bulb, and the digital computer, there were several inventors who did pioneering experimental work on voice transmission over a wire, who then improved on each other's ideas. However, the key innovators were Alexander Graham Bell and Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who created the first telephone company, the Bell Telephone Company in the United States, which later evolved into American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), at times the world's largest phone company.
Telephone technology grew quickly after the first commercial services emerged, with inter-city lines being built and telephone exchanges in every major city of the United States by the mid-1880s. The first transcontinental telephone call occurred on January 25, 1915. Despite this, transatlantic voice communication remained impossible for customers until January 7, 1927, when a connection was established using radio. However no cable connection existed until TAT-1 was inaugurated on September 25, 1956, providing 36 telephone circuits.
In 1880, Bell and co-inventor Charles Sumner Tainter conducted the world's first wireless telephone call via modulated lightbeams projected by photophones. The scientific principles of their invention would not be utilized for several decades, when they were first deployed in military and fiber-optic communications.
The first transatlantic telephone cable (which incorporated hundreds of electronic amplifiers) was not operational until 1956, only six years before the first commercial telecommunications satellite, Telstar, was launched into space.
== Radio and television ==

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Over several years starting in 1894, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi worked on adapting the newly discovered phenomenon of radio waves to telecommunication, building the first wireless telegraphy system using them. In December 1901, he established wireless communication between St. John's, Newfoundland and Poldhu, Cornwall (England), earning him a Nobel Prize in Physics (which he shared with Karl Braun) in 1909. In 1900, Reginald Fessenden was able to wirelessly transmit a human voice.
Millimetre wave communication was first investigated by Bengali physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose during 18941896, when he reached an extremely high frequency of up to 60 GHz in his experiments. He also introduced the use of semiconductor junctions to detect radio waves, when he patented the radio crystal detector in 1901.
In 1924, Japanese engineer Kenjiro Takayanagi began a research program on electronic television. In 1925, he demonstrated a cathode-ray tube (CRT) television with thermal electron emission. In 1926, he demonstrated a CRT television with 40-line resolution, the first working example of a fully electronic television receiver. In 1927, he increased the television resolution to 100 lines, which was unrivaled until 1931. In 1928, he was the first to transmit human faces in half-tones on television, influencing the later work of Vladimir K. Zworykin.
On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird publicly demonstrated the transmission of moving silhouette pictures at the London department store Selfridge's. Baird's system relied upon the fast-rotating Nipkow disk, and thus it became known as the mechanical television. In October 1925, Baird was successful in obtaining moving pictures with halftone shades, which were by most accounts the first true television pictures. This led to a public demonstration of the improved device on 26 January 1926 again at Selfridges. His invention formed the basis of semi-experimental broadcasts done by the British Broadcasting Corporation beginning September 30, 1929.
For most of the twentieth century televisions used the cathode-ray tube (CRT) invented by Karl Braun. Such a television was produced by Philo Farnsworth, who demonstrated crude silhouette images to his family in Idaho on September 7, 1927. Farnsworth's device would compete with the concurrent work of Kalman Tihanyi and Vladimir Zworykin. Though the execution of the device was not yet what everyone hoped it could be, it earned Farnsworth a small production company. In 1934, he gave the first public demonstration of the television at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute and opened his own broadcasting station. Zworykin's camera, based on Tihanyi's Radioskop, which later would be known as the Iconoscope, had the backing of the influential Radio Corporation of America (RCA). In the United States, court action between Farnsworth and RCA would resolve in Farnsworth's favour. John Logie Baird switched from mechanical television and became a pioneer of colour television using cathode-ray tubes.
After mid-century the spread of coaxial cable and microwave radio relay allowed television networks to spread across even large countries.
== Semiconductor era ==
The modern period of telecommunication history from 1950 onwards is referred to as the semiconductor era, due to the wide adoption of semiconductor devices in telecommunication technology. The development of transistor technology and the semiconductor industry enabled significant advances in telecommunication technology, led to the price of telecommunications services declining significantly, and led to a transition away from state-owned narrowband circuit-switched networks to private broadband packet-switched networks. In turn, this led to a significant increase in the total number of telephone subscribers, reaching nearly 1 billion users worldwide by the end of the 20th century.
The development of metaloxidesemiconductor (MOS) large-scale integration (LSI) technology, information theory and cellular networking led to the development of affordable mobile communications. There was a rapid growth of the telecommunications industry towards the end of the 20th century, primarily due to the introduction of digital signal processing in wireless communications, driven by the development of low-cost, very large-scale integration (VLSI) RF CMOS (radio-frequency complementary MOS) technology.
=== Videotelephony ===
The development of videotelephony involved the historical development of several technologies which enabled the use of live video in addition to voice telecommunications. The concept of videotelephony was first popularized in the late 1870s in both the United States and Europe, although the basic sciences to permit its very earliest trials would take nearly a half century to be discovered. This was first embodied in the device which came to be known as the video telephone, or videophone, and it evolved from intensive research and experimentation in several telecommunication fields, notably electrical telegraphy, telephony, radio, and television.
The development of the crucial video technology first started in the latter half of the 1920s in the United Kingdom and the United States, spurred notably by John Logie Baird and AT&T's Bell Labs. This occurred in part, at least by AT&T, to serve as an adjunct supplementing the use of the telephone. A number of organizations believed that videotelephony would be superior to plain voice communications. However, video technology was to be deployed in analog television broadcasting long before it could become practical—or popular—for videophones.
Videotelephony developed in parallel with conventional voice telephone systems from the mid-to-late 20th century. Only in the late 20th century with the advent of powerful video codecs and high-speed broadband did it become a practical technology for regular use. With the rapid improvements and popularity of the Internet, it became widespread through the use of videoconferencing and webcams, which frequently utilize Internet telephony, and in business, where telepresence technology has helped reduce the need to travel.
Practical digital videotelephony was only made possible with advances in video compression, due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed video. To achieve Video Graphics Array (VGA) quality video (480p resolution and 256 colors) with raw uncompressed video, it would require a bandwidth of over 92 Mbps.
=== Satellite ===

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The first U.S. satellite to relay communications was Project SCORE in 1958, which used a tape recorder to store and forward voice messages. It was used to send a Christmas greeting to the world from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1960 NASA launched an Echo satellite; the 100-foot (30 m) aluminized PET film balloon served as a passive reflector for radio communications. Courier 1B, built by Philco, also launched in 1960, was the world's first active repeater satellite. Satellites these days are used for many applications such as GPS, television, internet and telephone.
Telstar was the first active, direct relay commercial communications satellite. Belonging to AT&T as part of a multi-national agreement between AT&T, Bell Telephone Laboratories, NASA, the British General Post Office, and the French National PTT (Post Office) to develop satellite communications, it was launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962, the first privately sponsored space launch. Relay 1 was launched on December 13, 1962, and became the first satellite to broadcast across the Pacific on November 22, 1963.
The first and historically most important application for communication satellites was in intercontinental long-distance telephony. The fixed Public Switched Telephone Network relays telephone calls from land line telephones to an earth station, where they are then transmitted a receiving satellite dish via a geostationary satellite in Earth orbit. Improvements in submarine communications cables, through the use of fiber-optics, caused some decline in the use of satellites for fixed telephony in the late 20th century, but they still exclusively service remote islands such as Ascension Island, Saint Helena, Diego Garcia, and Easter Island, where no submarine cables are in service. There are also some continents and some regions of countries where landline telecommunications are rare to nonexistent, for example Antarctica, plus large regions of Australia, South America, Africa, Northern Canada, China, Russia and Greenland.
After commercial long-distance telephone service was established via communication satellites, a host of other commercial telecommunications were also adapted to similar satellites starting in 1979, including mobile satellite phones, satellite radio, satellite television and satellite Internet access. The earliest adaption for most such services occurred in the 1990s as the pricing for commercial satellite transponder channels continued to drop significantly.
Realization and demonstration, on October 29, 2001, of the first digital cinema transmission by satellite in Europe of a feature film by Bernard Pauchon, Alain Lorentz, Raymond Melwig and Philippe Binant.
=== Computer networks and the Internet ===
On September 11, 1940, George Stibitz was able to transmit problems using teletype to his Complex Number Calculator in New York City and receive the computed results back at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. This configuration of a centralized computer or mainframe with remote dumb terminals remained popular throughout the 1950s. However, it was not until the 1960s that researchers started to investigate packet switching a technology that would allow chunks of data to be sent to different computers without first passing through a centralized mainframe. A four-node network emerged on December 5, 1969, between the University of California, Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara. This network would become ARPANET, which by 1981 would consist of 213 nodes. In June 1973, the first non-US node was added to the network belonging to Norway's NORSAR project. This was shortly followed by a node in London.
ARPANET's development centred on the Request for Comments process and on April 7, 1969, RFC 1 was published. This process is important because ARPANET would eventually merge with other networks to form the Internet and many of the protocols the Internet relies upon today were specified through this process. The first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification, RFC 675 (Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program), was written by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, and published in December 1974. It coined the term "Internet" as a shorthand for internetworking. In September 1981, RFC 791 introduced the Internet Protocol v4 (IPv4). This established the TCP/IP protocol, which much of the Internet relies upon today. The User Datagram Protocol (UDP), a more relaxed transport protocol that, unlike TCP, did not guarantee the orderly delivery of packets, was submitted on 28 August 1980 as RFC 768. An e-mail protocol, SMTP, was introduced in August 1982 by RFC 821 and [[HTTP|http://1.0]] a protocol that would make the hyperlinked Internet possible was introduced in May 1996 by RFC 1945.
However, not all important developments were made through the Request for Comments process. Two popular link protocols for local area networks (LANs) also appeared in the 1970s. A patent for the Token Ring protocol was filed by Olof Söderblom on October 29, 1974. And a paper on the Ethernet protocol was published by Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs in the July 1976 issue of Communications of the ACM. The Ethernet protocol had been inspired by the ALOHAnet protocol which had been developed by electrical engineering researchers at the University of Hawaii.
Internet access became widespread late in the century, using the old telephone and television networks.
=== Digital telephone technology ===

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MOS technology was initially overlooked by Bell because they did not find it practical for analog telephone applications. MOS technology eventually became practical for telephone applications with the MOS mixed-signal integrated circuit, which combines analog and digital signal processing on a single chip, developed by former Bell engineer David A. Hodges with Paul R. Gray at UC Berkeley in the early 1970s. In 1974, Hodges and Gray worked with R.E. Suarez to develop MOS switched capacitor (SC) circuit technology, which they used to develop the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) chip, using MOSFETs and MOS capacitors for data conversion. This was followed by the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) chip, developed by Gray and J. McCreary in 1975.
MOS SC circuits led to the development of PCM codec-filter chips in the late 1970s. The silicon-gate CMOS (complementary MOS) PCM codec-filter chip, developed by Hodges and W.C. Black in 1980, has since been the industry standard for digital telephony. By the 1990s, telecommunication networks such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) had been largely digitized with very-large-scale integration (VLSI) CMOS PCM codec-filters, widely used in electronic switching systems for telephone exchanges and data transmission applications.
=== Wireless revolution ===
The wireless revolution began in the 1990s, with the advent of digital wireless networks leading to a social revolution, and a paradigm shift from wired to wireless technology, including the proliferation of commercial wireless technologies such as cell phones, mobile telephony, pagers, wireless computer networks, cellular networks, the wireless Internet, and laptop and handheld computers with wireless connections. The wireless revolution has been driven by advances in radio frequency (RF) and microwave engineering, and the transition from analog to digital RF technology.
Advances in metaloxidesemiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET, or MOS transistor) technology, the key component of the RF technology that enables digital wireless networks, has been central to this revolution. Hitachi developed the vertical power MOSFET in 1969, but it was not until Ragle perfected the concept in 1976 that the power MOSFET became practical. In 1977 Hitachi announce a planar type of DMOS that was practical for audio power output stages. RF CMOS (radio frequency CMOS) integrated circuit technology was later developed by Asad Abidi at UCLA in the late 1980s. By the 1990s, RF CMOS integrated circuits were widely adopted as RF circuits, while discrete MOSFET (power MOSFET and LDMOS) devices were widely adopted as RF power amplifiers, which led to the development and proliferation of digital wireless networks. Most of the essential elements of modern wireless networks are built from MOSFETs, including base station modules, routers, telecommunication circuits, and radio transceivers. MOSFET scaling has led to rapidly increasing wireless bandwidth, which has been doubling every 18 months (as noted by Edholm's law).
== Timeline ==
=== Visual, auditory and ancillary methods (non-electrical) ===
Prehistoric: Fires, beacons, smoke signals, communication drums, horns
6th century BCE: Mail
5th century BCE: Pigeon post
4th century BCE: Hydraulic semaphores
15th century CE: Maritime flag semaphores
1672: First experimental acoustic (mechanical) telephone
1790: Semaphore lines (optical telegraphs)
1867: Signal lamps
1877: Acoustic phonograph
=== Basic electrical signals ===
1838: Electrical telegraph. See: Telegraph history
1830s: Beginning of attempts to develop "wireless telegraphy", systems using some form of ground, water, air or other media for conduction to eliminate the need for conducting wires.
1858: First trans-Atlantic telegraph cable
1876: Telephone. See: Invention of the telephone, History of the telephone, Timeline of the telephone
1880: Telephony via lightbeam photophones
=== Advanced electrical and electronic signals ===
1896: First practical wireless telegraphy systems based on Radio. See: History of radio.
1900: first television displayed only black and white images. Over the next decades, colour television were invented, showing images that were clearer and in full colour.
1914: First North American transcontinental telephone calling
1927: Television. See: History of television
1927: First commercial radio-telephone service, U.K.U.S.
1930: First experimental videophones
1934: First commercial radio-telephone service, U.S.Japan
1936: World's first public videophone network
1946: Limited capacity Mobile Telephone Service for automobiles
1947: First working transistor (see History of the transistor)
1950: Semiconductor era begins
1956: Transatlantic telephone cable
1962: Commercial telecommunications satellite
1964: Fiber optical telecommunications
1965: First North American public videophone network
1969: Computer networking
1973: First modern-era mobile (cellular) phone
1974: Internet (see History of Internet)
1979: INMARSAT ship-to-shore satellite communications
1981: First mobile (cellular) phone network
1982: SMTP email
1998: Mobile satellite hand-held phones
2003: VoIP Internet Telephony
== See also ==
History of the Internet
History of podcasting
History of radio
History of television
History of the telephone
History of videotelephony
Information Age
Information revolution
Optical communication
Outline of telecommunication
== References ==
=== Sources ===
Wenzlhuemer, Roland. Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization. Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN 9781107025288
== Further reading ==
Hilmes, Michele. Network Nations: A Transnational History of American and British Broadcasting (2011)
John, Richard. Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Harvard U.P. 2010), emphasis on telephone
Noll, Michael. The Evolution of Media, 2007, Rowman & Littlefield
Poe, Marshall T. A History of Communications: Media and Society From the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge University Press; 2011) 352 pages; Documents how successive forms of communication are embraced and, in turn, foment change in social institutions.
Wheen, Andrew. DOT-DASH TO DOT.COM: How Modern Telecommunications Evolved from the Telegraph to the Internet (Springer, 2011)
Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2010)
Lundy, Bert. Telegraph, Telephone and Wireless: How Telecom Changed the World (2008)
== External links ==
Katz, Randy H., "History of Communications Infrastructures" Archived 2011-09-30 at the Wayback Machine, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) Department, University of California, Berkeley.
International Telecommunication Union
Aronsson's Telecom History Timeline
From the Thurn & Taxis to the Phone Book of the World - 730 years of Telecom History
Telecommunications History Group Virtual Museum
Telecommunications History Germany
Telecommunications History France

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The philosophy of archaeology seeks to investigate the foundations, methods and implications of the discipline of archaeology in order to further understand the human past and present.
Core questions address the definition of archaeology, its theoretical foundations, and the ways in which the discipline conceptualizes time. They also examine the purposes of archaeology, including why it is conducted and for whose benefit, as well as the nature and reality of the materials and processes that constitute archaeological inquiry. Analytic philosophy of archaeology explores the conceptual structure underlying terms such as artefact, site, archaeological record, and archaeological culture. These issues represent part of the broader metaphysical, aesthetic, epistemological, ethical, and theoretical concerns central to archaeological practice.
In addition to these general questions, the philosophy of archaeology is also concerned with fieldwork methodology, integration of theory and collaboration with other disciplines, theories of measurement and data representation.
Philosophy of archaeology can also denote a certain approach or attitude applied to the discipline, such as feminist, Marxist, humanist or processual for example. These approaches are generally referred to as "theory" by archaeologists and are sometimes conflated with, but are not the same as, analytic philosophy of archaeology. See Archeological theory for a full description of these approaches.
There is currently little consensus amongst archaeologists on the nature of the problems in the philosophy of archaeology, or indeed in some cases, whether a philosophy of archaeology should, or even can, exist. As such, the discipline is not highly developed, with even its existence or relevance disputed by some archaeologists. However, it is generally recognised that an awareness of the philosophical issues and framework of the subject through research into the philosophy of archaeology is important for progress in the discipline as well as for designing research, controlling inference and interpretation, and in classification.
== History ==
The roots of archaeological enquiry can be traced ultimately to mankinds urge to explain the origin of the world around them. These early cosmological explanations for the origins of the universe took the form of mythology. With the rise of complex civilisations such as Sumer, Babylon, Egypt and Persia, and with their increasingly sophisticated priesthood, these mythological explanations became also more sophisticated.
These philosophies claimed that there was a beginning, an origin of all things, and conceived it as a formless void or Chaos out of which all matter was created. These explanations established the idea of a first principle or origin underlying and uniting all things, an idea that was passed into Greek as the word arché/ἀρχῆ.
=== Greek philosophy ===
Initially, in keeping with its origins, the arché in Greek thought was believed to be divine, as for example in the 8th century BC cosmogony of Hesiod. But, in the 7th century BC Thales of Miletus, taking the concept of the arché from mythology, was the first to say that it was not divine in origin, but natural. He went on to claim that the arché was water. The Greek philosophers that came after him continued the search for the arché in nature and because of this they were known as physiologoi (meaning physical or natural philosophers) to differentiate them from the theologoi, who based their philosophy on a supernatural basis. Archaeology therefore inherited the burden of explaining the origin of things, and how they change, both once the exclusive preserve of religion, without recourse to divine intervention.
Thus, the scientific approach of archaeology can be traced in the west to the Ancient Greeks and their search for the origin or first principle of causation in nature rather than in the divine. Once the search for explanation was separated from divine sources and combined with principles such as Parmenides of Elea's dictum that nothing comes from nothing the search for the principles of causation led to the belief that the world and its processes could be rendered intelligible through rational thought. This led to the further realisation that the natural history and development of humanity might also be rationally investigated.
In this way the principle of sufficient reason, the principle of causal synonymy, along with the axiom that nothing can come from nothing, led to the foundation of archaeological enquiry as a process of natural science. Archaeology is therefore a development of the early history of the philosophy of science
The search for the arche was then applied to mankind, leading to the first theories of the evolution of organisms. However, despite philosophers realisation that mankind must have been once more primitive, and some attempts towards explaining the development of human speech along evolutionary lines, archaeology In the Classical world remained a predominantly philosophical pursuit.
=== Submersion and recovery ===
Its development was interrupted by the rise of Christian scholasticism and the re-establishment of divine origin explanations in western culture in the 4th and 5th centuries AD. The recovery of concepts was spurred by the rediscovery of Lucretius' Epicurean poem "On Nature" which set out an archaeological explanation for the evolution of humans. The revival of Classical studies during the Renaissance was an archaeological exercise though not scientific in its process.
=== Modern development ===
Developments in the 19th century with Hutton's and Lyell's theory of uniformitarianism and Darwin's theory of natural selection both of which set the stage for the modern scientific investigation into the origin of humanity.
== Epistemology ==
Archaeological epistemology concerns what archaeological knowledge is, its particularities, how it can be acquired, and the extent to which it can be known about something. It also concerns the subjective or objective nature of archaeological enquiry, and the standards that should apply to claims to archaeological knowledge. As Alison Wylie explained, "[w]hat you find, archaeologically, has everything to do with what you look for, with the questions you ask and the conceptual resources you bring to bear in attempting to answer them."

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== Ontology ==
The ontology of archaeology is concerned with what archaeological entities exist, can be said to exist, and what their relations to each other might be. For example, what is an artefact, a site or a culture and do they exist as separate entities? If entities are agreed to exist how should they be categorised or recorded. A branch of research in archaeological ontology is known as typology which attempts to sort objects into classes based on physical characteristics.
The existence and nature of time is also of concern in archaeological ontology. For example, what effect does periodisation, e.g. the three age model, have on archaeological theory and practice. Questions of the ontological nature of both time and objects are of great importance in the design of archaeological databases and are of increasing importance as the computerisation of archaeological processes and data increases.
== Theory ==
The philosophy of archaeology is also concerned with the construction of theories within the discipline.
Archaeology is a theoretically fragmented field with no generally applied interpretative theory underpinning the discipline. A multitude of different theoretical approaches have developed over the last 50 years and exist in parallel across the discipline. These range broadly from an empirical archaeology viewed as a science, to a relativistic post-modern concept of archaeology as an ideology that cannot verify its own concepts.
Therefore, the search for a unifying explanatory theory is a major concern among philosophers of archaeology. However, even the possibility of such a theory is denied by some archaeologists, emphasising the dislocation in archaeological approaches.
== Ethics ==
Archaeological ethics investigates issues surrounding the use of archaeological sites and materials. Who sanctions, controls and pays for such use is often disputed. For example, concerning the rights of indigenous people, especially in colonial situations where archaeology may be used to support narratives of oppression or dispossession. Or those whose beliefs are incompatible with certain archaeological practices, such as the removal of bodies from ancient graveyards.
Other examples include the use of archaeology for political purposes, such as land claims, or to prop up regimes or certain ideologies for example the notorious Ahnenerbe under the Third Reich.
The study of bias in archaeological narratives for example the association of archaeology with colonial history and subsequent issues over ownership of artifacts. For example, the continuing controversy over the Elgin Marbles.
== References ==

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Philosophy of ecology is a concept under the philosophy of science, which is a subfield of philosophy. Its main concerns centre on the practice and application of ecology, its moral issues, and the intersectionality between the position of humans and other entities. This topic also overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, for example, as it attempts to answer metaphysical, epistemic and moral issues surrounding environmental ethics and public policy.
The aim of the philosophy of ecology is to clarify and critique the 'first principles, which are the fundamental assumptions present in science and the natural sciences. Although there has yet to be a consensus about what presupposes philosophy of ecology, and the definition for ecology is up for debate, there are some central issues that philosophers of ecology consider when examining the role and purpose of what ecologists practice. For example, this field considers the 'nature of nature', the methodological and conceptual issues surrounding ecological research, and the problems associated with these studies within its contextual environment.
Philosophy addresses the questions that make up ecological studies, and presents a different perspective into the history of ecology, environmental ethics in ecological science, and the application of mathematical models.
== Background ==
=== History ===
Ecology is considered as a relatively new scientific discipline, having been acknowledged as a formal scientific field in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although an established definition of ecology has yet to be presented, there are some commonalities in the questions proposed by ecologists.
Ecology was considered as “the science of the economy [and] habits,” according to Stauffer, and was proponent in understanding the external interrelations between organisms. It was recognised formally as a field of science in 1866 by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Haeckel termed ecology in his book, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866), in the attempt to present a synthesis of morphology, taxonomy, and the evolution of animals.
Haeckel aimed to refine the notion of ecology and propose a new area of study to investigate population growth and stability, as influenced by Charles Darwin and his work in Origin of Species (1859). He had first expressed ecology as an interchangeable term constituted within an area of biology and an aspect of physiology of relationships. In the English translation by Stauffer, Haeckel defined ecology as “the whole science of the relationship of organism to environment including, in the broad sense, all the conditions for existence.'” This neologism was used to distinguish studies conducted on the field, as opposed to those conducted within the laboratory. He expanded upon this definition of ecology after considering the Darwinian theory of evolution and natural selection.
=== Defining ecology ===
There is yet to be an established consensus amongst philosophers about the exact definition of ecology, however, there are commonalities in the research agendas that helps differentiate this discipline from other natural sciences.
Ecology underlies an ecological worldview, wherein interaction and connectedness are emphasized and developed through several themes:
The idea that living and non-living beings are related and interconnected components in the biospherical web.
Living entities possess an identity that expresses their relatedness.
It is essential to understand the system of the biosphere and the components as a whole, rather than as their parts (also known as holism).
Occurrence of naturalism, whereby all living organisms are governed by the same natural laws.
Non-anthropocentrism, which is the rejection of anthropocentrism and its views on humans being the central entity, governed by the belief that value in the non-human world is to serve human interest. Non-anthropocentrism dictates that non-human world retains value and does not serve to benefit human interest.
Anthropogenic degradation of the environment dictates a necessity for environmental ethics.
There are three main disciplinary categories of ecology: Romantic ecology, political ecology, and scientific ecology. Romantic ecology, also called aesthetic or literary ecology, was a counter-movement to the increasingly anthropocentric and mechanistic ideology presented in modern Europe and America of the nineteenth century, especially during the Industrial Revolution. Some notable figures of this period include William Wordsworth (1770-1862), John Muir (1838-1914), and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). Scope of romantic ecological influence also extends into politics, and in which political interrelation with ethics underline political ecology.
Political ecology, also known as axiological or values-based ecology, considers the socio-political implications surrounding the ecological landscape. Some fundamental questions political ecologists ask generally focus on the ethics between nature and society. American environmentalist Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), affirm that ethics should be extended to encompass the land and biotic communities as well, rather than pertaining exclusively to individuals. In this sense, political ecology can be denoted as a form of environmental ethics.
Finally, scientific ecology, or commonly known as ecology, addresses central concerns, such as understanding the role of the ecologists and what they study, and the types of methodology and conceptual issues that surround the development of these studies and what type of problem this may present.

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=== Contemporary ecology ===
Defining contemporary ecology requires looking at certain fundamental principles, namely principles of system and evolution. System entails understanding the processes, of which interconnected sections establish a holistic identity, not separated or predictable from their components. Evolution results from the generation of variety as a means to produce change. Certain entities that interact with their environments create evolution through survival, and it is the production of changes that shape ecological systems. This evolutionary process is central to ecology and biology.
There are three main concerns that ecologists generally concur with: naturalism, scientific realism, and the comprehensive scope of ecology.
Philosopher Frederick Ferre defines two different primary meanings for nature in Being and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Metaphysics (1996). The first definition does not consider nature as 'artifacts of human manipulation, and nature, in this sense, comprises those not of artificial origins. The second definition establishes natures as those not of supernatural conceptions, which includes artefacts of human manipulation in this case. However, there is confusion of meaning as both connotations are used interchangeably in its application in different contexts by different ecologists.
==== Naturalism ====
There is yet to be a defined explanation of naturalism within philosophy of ecology, however, its current usage connotes the idea that underlines a system containing a reality subsumed by nature, independent of the supernatural world or existence. Naturalism, asserts the notion that scientific methodology is sufficient to obtain knowledge about reality. Naturalists who support this perspective view mental, biological, and social operations as physical entities. For example, considering a pebble or a human being, these existences occur concurrently within the same space and time. Applications of these scientific methods remain relevant and sufficient as it explains the spatiotemporal processes that physical entities undergo as spatiotemporal beings.
== Methodology ==
=== Holism vs reductionism ===
The holism-reductionism debate encompasses ontological, methodological and epistemic concerns. Common questions involve examining whether the means to understanding an object is through critical analyses of its constituents (reductionism) or contextualisation of its components (holism) to retain phenomenological value. Holists maintain that certain unique properties are attributed to the abiotic or biotic entity, such as an ecosystem, and how these characteristics are not intrinsically applicable to its separate components. Analysis of just the parts are insufficient in obtaining knowledge of the entire unit. On the other spectrum, reductionists argue that these parts are independent of each other, and that knowledge of the components provide understanding of the composite entity. This approach, however, has been criticised, as the entity does not just denote just the unity of its aggregates but rather a synthesis between the whole and its parts.
=== Rationalism vs empiricism ===
Rationalism within scientific ecology such methodologies remain necessary and relevant in their role for establishing ecological theory as a guide. Methodology employed under rationalist approaches became pronounced in the 1920s by Alfred Lotka's (1956) and Vito Volterra's (1926) logistic models that are known as Lotka-Volterra equations. Empiricism establishes the need for observational and empirical testing. An obvious consequence of this paradigm is the presence and usage of pluralistic methodology, although there has yet to be a unifying model adequate for application in ecology, and neither has there yet to establish a pluralistic theory as well.
== Environmental ethics ==
Environmental ethics emerged in the 1970s in response to traditional anthropocentrism. It studies the moral implications between social and environmental interactions, prompted from concerns of environmental degradation, and challenged the ethical positionality of humans. A common belief amongst environmental philosophy is the view that biological entities are morally valuable and independent of human standards. Within this field, there is the shared assumption that environmental issues are prominently anthropogenic, and that this stems from an anthropocentric argument. The basis in rejecting anthropocentrism is to refute the belief that non-human entities are not worthy of value.
A main concern in environmental ethics is anthropogenically induced mass extinction within the biosphere. The attempt to interpret it non-anthropocentrically is vital to the foundations of environmental ethics. Paleontology, for example, details mass extinction as pivotal and a precursor to major radiations. Those with non-anthropocentric views interpret the death of dinosaurs as a preservation of biodiversity and principle to anthropocentric values. As ecology is closely entwined with ethics, understanding environmental approaches require understanding the world, which is the role of ecology and environmental ethics. The main issue is to also incorporate natural entities in its ethical concern, which involves conscious, sentient, living and existing beings.

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== Mathematical models ==
Mathematical models play a role in questioning the issues presented in ecology and conservation biology. There are mainly two types of models used to explore the relationship between applications of mathematics and practice within ecology. The first are descriptive models, which details single-species population growth, for example, and multi-species models like Lotka-Volterra predator-prey models or Nicholson-Baily host-parasitoid model. These models explain behavioural activity through the idealisation of the intended target. The second type are normative models, which describe the current state of variables and how certain variables should behave.
In ecology, complicated biological interactions require explanation, which is where the models are used to investigate hypotheses. For example, identification and explanations of certain organisms and population abundance is essential for understanding the role of ecology and biodiversity. Applications of equations provide an inclination towards a prediction, or a model to suggest an answer for these questions that come up. Mathematical model in particular also provide contextual supporting information regarding factors on a wider, more global scale as well.
The purpose of these models and the differences in normative models and scientific models is that the differences in their standards entail different applications. These models aid in illustrating decision making outcomes, and also aid in tackling group decisions. For example, mathematical models incorporate environmental decisions of people within a group holistically. The model helps represent the values of each members, and the weightings of respect in the matrix. The model will then deliver the final result. In the case of conflict about proceedings or how to represent certain quantities, the model may be limited in that it would be deemed not of use. Furthermore, the number of idealisations in the model are also presented.
=== Criticisms ===
The process of mathematical modelling presents distinction between reality and theory, or more specifically, the application of models against the genuine phenomena these models aim to represent. Critics of the employment of mathematical models within ecology question its use and the extent of their relevance, prompted by an imbalance in investigative procedure and theoretical propositions. According to Weiner (1995), deterministic models have been ineffectual within ecology. The Lotka-Volterra models, Weiner argues, have not yielded testable predictions. In cases where theoretical models within ecology produced testable predictions, they have been refuted.
The purpose of the Lotka-Volterra models is to track the predator and prey interaction and their population cycles. The usual pattern maintains that the predator population follows the prey population fluctuations. For example, as prey population increase, so does the predator, and likewise in prey population decrease, predator population decreases. However, Weiner argues that, in reality, prey population still maintains their oscillating cycles, even if the predator is removed, and is an inaccurate representation of natural phenomena. Criticism in how idealisation is inherent within modelling and application of this is methodologically deficient. They also maintain that mathematical modelling within ecology is an oversimplification of reality, and a misrepresentation or insufficient representation of the biological system.
Application of simple or complex models are also up for debate. There is concern regarding the model results, wherein complexities of a system are not able to be replicated or adequately captured with a complicated model.
== See also ==
== References ==