An American sociologist who ranks second only to Sumner,
and in some respects excels him, for his use of ethnological
materials and his development of a "cultural" point of view is
William I. Thomas. In collaboration with Florian Znaniecki,
in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, he took the signifi-
cant step of applying the general viewpoint of ethnology to the
study of the customs, traditions, and social organization of
contemporary peoples living at a comparatively advanced stage
of civilization. Anthropologists have almost invariably defined
their science in such a way that it includes the study of the culture
of civilized peoples, but in practice they have been reluctant to
enter this field of research. In The Polish Peasant, Thomas and
Znaniecki undertook an investigation of the culture of Polish
peasants quite comparable to that which a sophisticated eth-
nographer would make of the culture of a savage tribe. Like
the later American anthropologists of the "historical school,"
they avoided the weakness commonly charged against the
exponents of the "comparative method," viz., that of losing the
significance of culture traits by abstracting them too casually
from their context. For these reasons, and for the important
contributions to sociological theory which it includes, The Polish
Peasant marks an epoch in the development of sociological
thought and research in the United States.

William Isaac Thomas was born in Russell County, Virginia,
in 1863. He was graduated from the University of Tennessee in
1884 and served as instructor in English and modern languages
in that institution from 1884 to 1888. In 1888-1889, he studied
at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen; then he served on the
faculty of Oberlin College, as professor of English, 1889-1894,
and as professor of sociology, 1894-1895. He was instructor in
sociology at the University of Chicago in 1895-1896, when the new
university and its department of sociology were just getting

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