He made significant contributions to the study of urban communities, race relations and the development of empirically grounded research methods, most notably participant observation in the field of criminology.

[4] He saw sociology as "...a point of view and a method for investigating the processes by which individuals are inducted into and induced to cooperate in some sort of permanent corporate existence, society.

Given the pseudonym "Middle Border" by American novelist Hamlin Garland, Red Wing was a small town of immigrants and Mdewakanton on the bluffs and in the valley along the northern Mississippi River.

Park was interested in attending college after high school, but his father did not consider his son "study material" and did not support the boy's plan.

[11] Park's experience as a reporter led him to study the social function of the newspaper, "not as an organ of opinion, but as a record of current events".

In 1894, Park married Clara Cahill, the daughter of a wealthy Michigan family and had four children: Edward, Theodosia, Margaret and Robert.

He was endlessly fascinated by the notion of exploring the realm of the dubious and unknown rather than focusing on the secure knowledge offered to him in his previous years of education.

His future work in the field of sociology, which primary focused on human's behavior in different environments, proves that this exploratory mindset stuck with him for the rest of his life.

[8] Simmel's work the Philosophy of Money and relative shorter essays greatly influenced Park's future writing.

[12] In Berlin, Park read a book on the logics of social sciences by Russian author Bogdan A. Kistyakovski, who studied under philosopher Wilhelm Windelband.

[9] It was this reading that inspired Park to spend a semester at the University of Strasbourg (1900), and then undergo his PhD in philosophy in 1903 in Heidelberg under Wilhelm Windelband and Alfred Hettner with a dissertation titled Masse und Publikum.

[13] Park taught there for two years until celebrated educator and author, Booker T. Washington, invited him to the Tuskegee Institute to work on racial issues in the southern United States.

[17] After the Tuskegee Institute, Park joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1914, first as a lecturer (until 1923), then as a full professor until his retirement in 1933.

[6] This class was important from a historical perspective because it may have been the first course ever offered at a predominantly white institution that focused exclusively on black Americans.

During Park's time at the University of Chicago, its sociology department began to use the city that surrounded it as a sort of research laboratory.

At various times from 1925, he was president of the American Sociological Association and of the Chicago Urban League, and he was a member of the Social Science Research Council.

[19] Park himself explains human ecology as, "fundamentally an attempt to investigate the processes by which the biotic balance and social equilibrium are disturbed, the transition is made from one relatively stable order to other".

While working under Washington, Park's primary interest was the system that had evolved to define Black-White relations in the South.

[3] After leaving the Tuskegee Institute, Park joined the University of Chicago where he developed a theory of assimilation, as it pertained to immigrants in the United States, known as the "race relation cycle".

In the years following the heyday of the Chicago school, Park's reputation took a downfall, and his idea of "symbolic interactionism" was subsequently pushed aside.

Already in his work as an editorial secretary of the Congo Reform Association, Park defended the idea of a noble white civilizing mission to elevate an allegedly savage African population.

During his years at the Tuskegee Institute, this nostalgia for European imperialism was complemented by a stereotypical depiction of black peasants in the South as a primitive counterpart of the negative tendencies Park identified in modern city life.

These early views on imperialism and race have been called a form of "romantic racism" that strongly influenced his later more elaborated sociological perspectives on the same issues.

In his essay Education in its relation to the conflict and fusion of cultures, Park can be quoted: The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intel-lectual nor an idealist, like the Jew; nor a brooding introspective, like the East African; nor a pioneer and frontiersman, like the Anglo-Saxon.

The works of sociologists Louis Wirth and Rose Hum Lee illustrate the downfalls of Park's thinking, specifically in relation to adhering to his views on ethnic groups in America.

Park's conclusions that the complete assimilation of Jews, Christians, and Chinese folks have occurred was shown within Wirth and Hum Lee's work to be untrue.

The majority of the sociologists born in the nineteenth century borrowed and concentrated in other fields and their work was considered sociological after the fact.

[6] Park was one such sociologist, with much of his interests originating in philosophy and then evolving into what we consider to be modern sociology when he began to focus on studying Chicago.

Park along with fellow Chicago School sociologists Ernest Burgess, William I. Thomas, George Herbert Mead,[32] and Louis Wirth created a theoretical basis for sociology which emphasized the more methodological approach which we recognize today.

Additionally, Erving Goffman, who is considered to be the most influential sociologist of the twenty-first century, embraced the legacy of Park by adopting more qualitative methods when constructing predictive empirical science in contrast to positivist sociological trends.