Introduction

Between 1922 and 1929, at the same time that the Memorial worked to build five research centres in the social sciences, it also focused on building about a dozen research fields in the social sciences. The Memorial did this by supporting many smaller-scale projects at numerous institutions. It is up to today's scholars to fully identify the specific research fields emphasized by the Memorial, at least in terms of their exact boundaries and definitions; it seems there was never any singular and definite statement by the Memorial to identify all of these fields. This chapter studies nine research fields: race relations in the United States; problems in the American South; problems in the American West; problems in non-capitalist regions; land usage and population change; group biological similarities and differences; child welfare and parent education; international relations; and coordinated data collection.

Race Relations

The Memorial's main research centre for studying race relations was at the University of North Carolina. But given the profound impact of America's Great Migration that began in the 1910s, projects at both the University of Chicago and Columbia University were also involved in this research field. At the University of Chicago, social scientists studied matters of race relations within their local community research programme, where their chief focus was the process of assimilation.