Everett C. Hughes on Work, Race, and the Sociological Imagination. Edited and with anIntroduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 244 pp.$37.50 ISBN O-226-35972-7.

The husband and wife team of Everett Hughes and Helen MacGill Hughes was perhapsthe best example of Robert E. Park’s mentorship of young sociologists. Both were studentsof Park at the University of Chicago during the 1920s, and contemporaries of Chicago prodi-gies Louis Wirth and Herbert Blumer. Everett Hughes (1897–1983) went on to a long aca-demic career, carrying on Park’s strong interest in race relations, highlighted perhaps by hisreturn to chair Chicago’s sociology department after World War II. Helen MacGill(1903–1992), married to Hughes in 1927, also finished her doctorate under Park but was rel-egated by the era’s sexual division of academic labor into support roles. Helping her husbandwith his research and writing, and serving a seventeen-year tenure as a low-paid editor of theAmerican Journal of Sociology,Helen Hughes shared much of the Hughes’ sociologicalwork but little of the institutional reward. And so with the entry of a collection of EverettHughes’ essays into the University of Chicago Press Heritage of Sociology Series, LewisCoser mentions in his introduction the great contributions of Helen Hughes to the sociologi-cal tradition represented by the Hugheses and Robert Park, but it is Everett Hughes’ nameand picture that appear on the cover. Coser’s description of the lives and work of Everett andHelen Hughes place them within the now familiar story of Park and the Chicago school ofsociology. The seventeen essays, grouped thematically by the topics of work, race, and thesociological imagination, are united most of all by Hughes’ interest in the social relationswithin industry, and his essays on race relations often focus upon race in the workplace. Thedocuments show well the curiosity of Hughes and his ability to explicate the concepts of so-ciology in the same straightforward and example-laden style that marked his mentor’s writ-ing. Compared to the rather inaccessible language of both his contemporaries and of currentsociology, this collection of Everett and Helen Hughes’ work makes for a refreshing glimpseat how sociology was once practiced.

Reviewed by HENRY YU, Assistant Professor of History at UCLA.