who founded the school of functionalism and what were its primary beliefs
Functional psychology William James is considered to be the founder of functional psychology. Although he would not consider himself as a functionalist, nor did he truly like the way science divided itself into schools. John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Harvey A. Carr, and especially James Rowland Angell were the main proponents of functionalism at the University of Chicago. Another group at Columbia, including notably James McKeen Cattell, Edward L. Thorndike, and Robert S. Woodworth, were also considered functionalists and shared some of the opinions of Chicago's professors. Egon Brunswik represents a more recent, but Continental, version. The functionalists retained an emphasis on conscious experience.
History of sociology 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.[32] 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[33][34] and the first full-fledged independent university department of sociology was established in 1892 at the University of Chicago by Albion W. Small (1854â€“1926), who in 1895 founded the American Journal of Sociology.[35] 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.