Giddings created the second US sociology department at Columbia.

Evidence

The second major department of sociology in the USA (after Chicago’s) had been established at Columbia by Franklin Henry Giddings (1855-1931), one of the founders of sociology in the USA, who had become the first full professor of sociology at an American university in 1894 at Columbia. … In 1929, with his wife, he had published Middletown, an empirical study of Muncie, an industrial town in Indiana, and the book quickly became a sociological classic. Despite its passion for detailed description, the study showed that the town’s population clearly fell into the categories working class' and business class’, and that the town belonged to `them up there’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 580

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to empirical community sociology traditions (Middletown) that contrast with Frankfurt critical theory’s Marxist orientation; relevant background for the Institute’s later empirical work in America.