ABSTRACT
When philanthropist John D. Rockefeller decided to bankroll a new research university in the American Midwest, he was certainly not anticipating ethnographic studies of inverts, degenerates, and homosexuals. The president of the new University of Chicago would be William Rainey Harper, a professor of Hebrew and Semitic Studies at the Baptist Theological Seminary. The head of the new Sociology Department, the first in the United States, would be Albion W. Small, a former Baptist minister, who would supervise dissertations on such topics as The Hebrew Text of Zechariah I-VIII and Stages in the Theological Development of Martin Luther (Harper 1893; Bulmer 1984: 14).
