Thinkers Timeline

Jane Addams was an American sociologist, social reformer, and peace activist. She is one of the founders of American sociology, though she was left out of its history for many years. She was born on 6 September 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois. Her family was wealthy by local standards. Her father was a businessman and a friend of Abraham Lincoln. Her mother died when Jane was two. She studied at Rockford Female Seminary, graduating in 1881. She hoped to become a doctor but her health was fragile. For several years in her twenties, she felt lost. Women of her class were expected to marry and run a home, but she wanted something more meaningful. In 1887 she travelled to Europe with her close friend Ellen Gates Starr. In London they visited Toynbee Hall, a new kind of place where educated people lived among the poor and worked with them. They decided to do something similar in America. In 1889, they opened Hull House in a poor immigrant neighbourhood of Chicago. Hull House gave adult education, childcare, art classes, English lessons, and a safe meeting place for workers and reformers. It became the most famous settlement house in America. Addams lived there for the rest of her life. She wrote eleven books and hundreds of articles. She campaigned for women's right to vote, workers' rights, and peace. She opposed America's entry into the First World War. In 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She died on 21 May 1935, aged 74.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and one of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century. His full name was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, into a small free Black community in the North, and showed exceptional academic ability from childhood. He became the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University, in 1895, and also studied at the University of Berlin. He spent his long career at the intersection of scholarship and activism, writing groundbreaking works of sociology and history, co-founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), editing the influential journal The Crisis for many years, and eventually, in his final years, joining the Communist Party of America and emigrating to Ghana, where he died in 1963 at the age of ninety-five, on the eve of the March on Washington. His most important works include The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Black Reconstruction in America (1935), and The Philadelphia Negro (1899).

Patricia Hill Collins is an American sociologist. She is one of the most important thinkers on race, gender, and power in recent decades. She was born on 1 May 1948 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She grew up in a working-class Black family. Her mother was a secretary and her father worked in a factory. She was often the only Black student in her classrooms. This experience shaped her later ideas about being an outsider inside. She studied at Brandeis University and then Harvard, where she earned a Master's degree in teaching in 1970. She worked for several years as a teacher and community educator, including at the Saint Joseph Community School in Roxbury, Boston. She returned to Brandeis for her doctorate in sociology, which she completed in 1984. She taught at the University of Cincinnati for many years. In 2005, she moved to the University of Maryland, where she became Distinguished University Professor of Sociology. Her 1990 book Black Feminist Thought changed her field. It was the first major attempt to set out Black women's ideas as a coherent intellectual tradition. Since then, she has written many other important books including Black Sexual Politics (2004) and Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (2019). In 2009, she became the first Black woman to serve as President of the American Sociological Association, the largest body of sociologists in the world. She is now retired from teaching but continues to write. In 2023, she received the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, a major international award. She is one of the most honoured sociologists alive.