author
Samuel Joseph
b. 1881
An early 20th-century sociologist who turned the story of immigration into serious scholarship, he is best known for a landmark study of Jewish migration to the United States. His work helped document how large social changes shaped everyday lives.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in 1881, Samuel Joseph became an American sociologist with a strong interest in immigration, especially Jewish immigration. Reference sources describe him as having been brought to the United States from Russia as a child, a background that likely informed the questions he later pursued in his research.
He is best known for Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910, published by Columbia University in 1914. The book is a careful historical study of the forces behind migration from Eastern Europe and the patterns of settlement in America, and it remains the work most closely associated with his name.
Later in his career, he joined the sociology faculty at City College of New York in 1928 and became professor and department chair in 1940. Contemporary reference entries remember him as an expert on immigration problems and as one of the first Jews to hold a leading academic position in American sociology.