Editing Robert E. Park (section)

== Biography ==
=== Childhood and early life ===
Robert E. Park was born in Harveyville, [[Luzerne County, Pennsylvania]], on February 14, 1864, to parents Hiram Asa Park and Theodosia Warner Park. Immediately following his birth, the Park family moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, where he grew up.<ref name="bio" />

Park lived in [[Red Wing, Minnesota|Red Wing]] for his first eighteen years. Given the pseudonym "Middle Border" by American novelist [[Hamlin Garland]], Red Wing was a small town of immigrants and [[Dakota Sioux|Mdewakanton]] on the bluffs and in the valley along the northern [[Mississippi River]]. The rural area is fertile, and [[Minnesota]] serves as a corporate outpost for East Coast colonial investment in the American West; Park's hometown was connected to the [[Twin Cities]] nearby to the north and [[Chicago]] to the east by barge, riverboat, and railroad.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Park, Robert E {{!}} Encyclopedia.com|url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/park-robert-e-0|access-date=2021-10-18|website=www.encyclopedia.com}}</ref> Suggesting something of a criminology credential, Park later recalled an encounter with bandit [[Jesse James]], who young Park provided with directions to a local blacksmith's shop.<ref name=":2" /> Park has been described as an "awkward, sentimental and romantic boy" whose character led him to develop an interest in writing.<ref name=":1">Frazier, P. & Gaziano, Cecilie. (1979). Robert Ezra Park: His Theory of News, Public Opinion and Social Control. Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs. 64.</ref>  He was not considered a promising student, but he liked learning about the people in his town and their ancestries, a niche which would prove to be useful throughout his life. Park graduated high school in 1882, finishing tenth overall in a class of thirteen. Park was interested in attending college after high school, but his father did not consider his son "study material" and did not support the boy's plan. As a result, Robert ran away from home and found a job working on a railroad.<ref name="kennedy" />

Park's love of writing and concern for social issues, especially issues related to race in cities, led him to become a journalist. Franklin Ford and Park made plans for a newspaper, ''Thought News'', which would report public opinion. Although it was never published, Park still pursued a career as a journalist. From 1887 to 1898, Park worked as a journalist in [[Detroit]], [[Denver]], [[New York City]], [[Chicago]], and [[Minneapolis]].<ref name="ASA" /> Park's experience as a reporter led him to study the social function of the newspaper, "not as an organ of opinion, but as a record of current events".<ref name="bio" />  Towards the end of his newspaper career, Park became disenchanted with the idea that newspaper reporting could alone solved social issues.<ref name=":1" />  As a reporter Park learned a great deal about urban communities, which inspired his later sociological endeavors in [[#Race_relations|race relations]].

In 1894, Park married Clara Cahill, the daughter of a wealthy Michigan family and had four children: Edward, Theodosia, [[Margaret Park Redfield|Margaret]] and Robert.

=== Education ===
Park first attended the [[University of Minnesota]], where he excelled in his courses. Because of his success at the University of Minnesota, his father offered to invest in furthering Robert's education at the prestigious [[University of Michigan]]. Upon entering the University of Michigan, Park decided to transition from studying science to instead studying [[philology]]. His professor [[Calvin Thomas (linguist)|Calvin Thomas]] exerted a great influence on him. He challenged him to expand his mind and deeply pursue the concepts presented in his courses.<ref name="bio" />

[[John Dewey]] also had a very strong influence on Park during his college year. After Park took Dewey's course on logic his sophomore year of college, he decided to again shift his major, this time to [[philosophy]]. Park stated that his interest in going to college has originally been purely practical, originally intending to pursue engineering, but this mindset shifted when he began taking courses which truly intrigued him. He was endlessly fascinated by the notion of exploring the realm of the dubious and unknown rather than focusing on the secure knowledge offered to him in his previous years of education. Upon becoming a student of philosophy Park became, "presently possessed with a devouring curiosity to know more about the world and all that men had thought and done". His future work in the field of sociology, which primary focused on human's behavior in different environments, proves that this exploratory mindset stuck with him for the rest of his life.<ref name="bio" />

At the University of Michigan, Park was involved in the school newspaper, ''The Argonaut.'' He held a position of associate editor his junior year and managing editor his senior year. He wrote a satirical piece titled, "A Misapprehension, A Realistic Tale à la Henry James". The connections he formed at ''The Argonaut'' would prove helpful in later landing him a job as a reporter at Minneapolis newspaper.

Park graduated from the University of Michigan with a [[Bachelor of Arts]] degree ([[Phi Beta Kappa]]) in 1887. He attended [[Harvard University]] and earned a [[Master of Arts]] degree from Harvard in 1899. After graduating, he went to Germany to study Philosophy and Sociology from 1899 to 1900 with [[Georg Simmel]] at [[Humboldt University of Berlin|Friedrich Wilhelm University]] (nowadays the Humboldt University of Berlin) in [[Berlin]]. The three courses Park took with Simmel constituted the majority of his sociological training,<ref name=":1" /> and Park proceeded to adopt Simmel's belief that modernity would express itself most tangibly in the city.<ref name=":2" /> Simmel's work the ''[[The Philosophy of Money|Philosophy of Money]]'' and relative shorter essays greatly influenced Park's future writing.<ref>{{Cite book|last=A.|first=Salerno, Roger|url=http://worldcat.org/oclc/768412685|title=Beyond the Enlightenment : lives and thoughts of social theorists|date=2004|publisher=Greenwood Press|isbn=0-275-97724-2|pages=89|oclc=768412685}}</ref>  In Berlin, Park read a book on the logics of social sciences by Russian author [[Bogdan Kistyakovski|Bogdan A. Kistyakovski]], who studied under philosopher Wilhelm Windelband.<ref name=":1" />  It was this reading that inspired Park to spend a semester at the [[University of Strasbourg]] (1900), and then he pursued and received a [[Doctor of Philosophy]] in philosophy in 1904 from [[Heidelberg University]] under [[Wilhelm Windelband]] and [[Alfred Hettner]] with a dissertation titled ''Masse und Publikum; Eine methodologische und soziologische Untersuchung,'' which translates to ''Crowd and Public: A methodological and sociological study''.<ref name="uchicago" />

=== Professional life ===

==== Journalism ====
Park began his career with journaling in Minneapolis in 1887. Between then and 1898, he worked with newspapers in Detroit, Denver, New York, and Chicago until attending Harvard in 1898. He believed that his work for newspapers could encourage moral and social change through public outrage.<ref name=":5">{{Cite journal |last=Belman |first=Lary S. |date=December 1975 |title=Robert Ezra Park: An Intellectual Portrait of a Journalist and Communication Scholar |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00947679.1975.12066793 |journal=Journalism History |language=en |volume=2 |issue=4 |pages=116–132 |doi=10.1080/00947679.1975.12066793 |issn=0094-7679|url-access=subscription }}</ref> He worked in various journalistic capacities, such as being a police reporter, general reporter, and feature writer and city newspaper editor and wrote muckraking stories and investigative pieces and articles that called for techniques of "scientific reporting," which he later realized was similar to survey research.<ref name=":1" /> Park's main focus as a journalist was the daily life of human beings and their routines. His focus was what journalists call "human interest".<ref name=":4">{{Cite journal |last=Shils |first=Edward |date=1996 |title=The Sociology of Robert E. Park |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27698804 |journal=The American Sociologist |volume=27 |issue=4 |pages=88–106 |jstor=27698804 |issn=0003-1232}}</ref> His experience as a journalist impacted his view on the world and how people should study it. Although he was a journalist for many years he was not totally satisfied with just reporting current events. Park wanted to dive deeper than the surface of these events and understand the underlying long-term significance of the events.<ref name=":5" />

==== Teaching ====
In 1904, Park began teaching philosophy at Harvard  as an assistant professor.<ref name="uchicago" /> Park taught there for two years until celebrated educator and author, [[Booker T. Washington]], invited him to the [[Tuskegee Institute]] to work on racial issues in the southern United States.  Park was offered a position by the Congo Reform Association, but ended up subsequently working for Washington at Tuskegee. Park and Washington originally met through their mutual interest in helping Africans through the Congo Reform Association of which Park was secretary and Washington was vice president. Over the next seven years, Park worked for Washington by doing field research and taking courses. In 1910, Park traveled to Europe to compare US poverty to European poverty. Shortly after the trip, Washington, with the help of Park, published ''[[The Man Farthest Down]]'' (1913).<ref name="Yale" /> This publication highlights Parker and Washington's journey to explore Europe in the hopes of finding the man "the farthest down" in order to explore these people were choosing to emigrate and the likeliness of a future change in positions. This led them on a six-week journey through the British Isles, France, Italy, Poland, Denmark, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.<ref name="tuskegee" />

After the Tuskegee Institute, Park joined the Department of Sociology at the [[University of Chicago]] in 1914, first as a lecturer (until 1923), then as a full professor until his retirement in 1933.<ref name="ASA" /> During his time in Chicago, he continued to study and teach [[human ecology]] and race relations. In 1914, Park taught his first course in the Sociology and Anthropology department. The course was titled ''The Negro in America'' and it was, "Directed especially to the effects, in slavery and freedom, of the white and black race, an attempt will be made to characterize the nature of the present tensions and tendencies and to estimate the character of the changes which race relations are likely to bring about in the American system".<ref name="bio" /> This class was important from a historical perspective because it may have been the first course ever offered at a predominantly white institution that focused exclusively on black Americans. This set a precedent for classes with similar focuses to come.

==== Legacy ====
During Park's time at the University of Chicago, its sociology department began to use the city that surrounded it as a sort of research laboratory. His work, together with that of his Chicago colleagues, such as [[Ernest Burgess]], [[Homer Hoyt]], and [[Louis Wirth]] – developed into an approach to [[urban sociology]] that became known as the Chicago School. This would become Park's legacy.

After leaving the University of Chicago, Park moved to [[Nashville, Tennessee]]. He taught at [[Fisk University]] until his death in 1944, at age 79.<ref name="ASA" />

During his lifetime, Park became a well-known figure both within and outside the academic world. At various times from 1925, he was president of the [[American Sociological Association]] and of the [[Chicago Urban League]], and he was a member of the [[Social Science Research Council]].  Park's presidential address for the American Sociological Association was entitled "The Concept of Position in Sociology" and was later published in the ''Proceedings'' of the 1925 Annual Meeting.<ref>{{Cite web|date=2009-06-16|title=Robert E. Park|url=https://www.asanet.org/about/governance-and-leadership/council/presidents/robert-e-park|access-date=2021-10-19|website=American Sociological Association|language=en}}</ref>