Vice and Gangs
Professors and students focused on the city's problems. In his dissertation/book, Vice in Chicago, Walter Reckless studied fraud, prostitution, and organized crime.
Gangs are a persistent problem in today's Chicago. University of Chicago sociologists have been studying them since the mid-1920s when they were called boys' gangs. Frederic Thrasher's dissertation/book, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, was the first systematic study. One by one Thrasher located his gangs by neighborhood and ethnicity.
Another notable dissertation/book was The Taxi-Dance Hall by Paul G. Cressey. Aided by a team of assistants Cressey created an ethnography of this popular local institution. He wrote that the taxi-dance hall became a "social world," "morally isolated" from the wider society.
Noting their propensity to study the city's underworld, one contemporary sociologist has written that the Chicago scholars specialized in "Sociology Noir."
Map, 1927
Ernest Watson Burgess Papers
Manuscript, c1929
Ernest Watson Burgess Papers
This student paper is comprised of first-hand observations of funerals for some of the men killed in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Frederic M. Thrasher, 1927
University of Chicago Press Records
Clifford Shaw, 1931
University of Chicago Press Records
Paul G. Cressey (1900–1955)
Archival Monographs Collection
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1932
1942
University of Chicago Press Records
