author
Carl Kelsey
1870–1953
An early American sociologist and teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, he wrote on social welfare, labor, race, and U.S. policy in the Caribbean. His work reflects both the reform energy of the Progressive Era and the limits of some of its thinking.
1 Audiobook
The Negro Farmer
by Carl Kelsey
About the author
Born in Grinnell, Iowa, in 1870 and later based in Philadelphia, Carl Kelsey was an American sociologist who taught at the University of Pennsylvania for many years. He studied at Iowa College, Andover Theological Seminary, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1903.
Before and alongside his academic career, he worked in social service and became involved in child welfare and social-work education. He helped establish the Philadelphia Training School for Social Work, a program that later developed into Penn's School of Social Policy & Practice, showing how closely his scholarship was tied to public life.
Kelsey wrote on a wide range of subjects, including labor, social conditions, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. His best-known book is The Negro Farmer, first published as his doctoral thesis in 1903; it is now mainly of historical interest, and some of its arguments clearly reflect the racial assumptions common in mainstream academic writing of its time.