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AbstractThe Moynihan Report of 1965 will soon be fifty years old, and some social scientists now venerate it as a sterling application of social science data and analysis by the federal government. This author, who was directly involved in events connected with the release of the Report, does not agree; this article examines the shortcomings of the Report. I argue that Moynihan's analysis, which intended to investigate the ties between Black male unemployment and the Black family, actually devoted most of its attention to the high proportion of single-parent families in the poor Black population, treating it as one symptom of a "tangle of pathology" that stood in the way of this population's escape from joblessness and poverty. Today, the Report is being hailed as having predicted the current and still worsening state of the poor Black family. Moynihan's work is also being reinterpreted as an early application of cultural analysis, thereby further drawing attention away from the job-related issues which led Moynihan to undertake his study. Moynihan himself made significant contributions to antipoverty policy later in his career, but his Report does not deserve the worship it continues to receive.

After I conducted my 1997 study of best selling sociology books, I concluded that sociologists shouldn't attempt to publish best sellers but "intellectually and otherwise useful work… that adds to… the public understanding of society and if possible its improvement as well." The results of the Contexts Graduate Student Editorial Board study, which collected data on the sociological books people actually take home from bookstores, suggest some further conclusions.

Forty years ago, Manuel Castells asked whether urban sociology had a subject matter and whether the term urban still had meaning—and this article reopens these and related questions. It also wonders why today's American urban sociology has concentrated on cities, especially big ones, concurrently virtually ignoring the three other types of communities—suburbs, towns, and rural areas—in which a majority of Americans live and work. Further, it argues that this four–community typology is logically dubious and empirically obsolete. If the field were redefined as a sociology of settlements, analytically more logical and substantively more relevant typologies could be developed. Another politically and organizationally more realistic alternative would split the field into four: a sociology of the city and one concentrating on other settlements, with a third field devoted to community studies, and the fourth to spatial sociology.

I have written a strictly autobiographical essay about the half dozen areas or fields in which I have done sociological research during my career. One reason for writing the essay is to encourage students to become what I call a "multi," there being too few in sociology, as in other disciplines in which most researchers do their work in one field. I hope the essay demonstrates that working in many fields can make for a satisfying and productive career. Research across areas also encourages comparative work, and if enough young people become multi-field researchers, sociologists might then develop more interdisciplinary skills, which is even now desirable and may one day be necessary for all the social sciences. My essay also describes how and why I became interested in my six fields and how I moved between them during my career. The rest of the paper describes my major studies and other activities in my fields as well as the institutional and other contexts that I believe have affected my work.