Florian Witold Znaniecki (15 January 1882 – 23 March 1958) was a Polish-American philosopher and sociologist who taught and wrote in Poland and in the United States. Over the course of his work he shifted his focus from philosophy to sociology. He remains a major figure in the history of Polish and American sociology; the founder of Polish academic sociology, and of an entire school of thought in sociology. He won international renown as co-author, with William I. Thomas, of the study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), which is considered the foundation of modern empirical sociology. He also made major contributions to sociological theory, introducing terms such as humanistic coefficient and culturalism. In Poland, he established the first Polish department of sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University where he worked from 1920 to 1939. His career in the US begun at the University of Chicago (1917 to 1919) and continued at Columbia University (1932 to 1934 and 1939 to 1940) and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1942 to 1950). He was the 44th President of the American Sociological Association (for the year 1954). Life Childhood and education Florian Znaniecki was born on 15 January 1882 at Świątniki, Congress Poland, a state controlled by the Russian Empire to Leon Znaniecki and Amelia, née Holtz He received early schooling from tutors, then attended secondary schools at Warsaw and Częstochowa. While in secondary school, he was a member of an underground study group, specializing in history, literature and philosophy. His secondary-school grades were average at best, and he had to repeat a year of school; this was largely due to his extracurricular interest in Polish-language study, which was banned under the Russified school program. As a youth, he wrote some poetry, including a drama, Cheops (1903). A poem of his, "Do Prometeusza" ("To Prometheus"), was included in a 1900 anthology; however, neither he in later life, nor literary critics, judged his poetry outstanding. He entered the Imperial University of Warsaw in 1902, but was soon expelled after taking part in protests against the Russian administration's curtailment of student rights. Threatened with conscription into the Imperial Russian Army, he chose to emigrate and in early 1904 left Warsaw for Switzerland. During that period, he was briefly an editor at a French-language literary magazine, Nice Illustrée (late 1904 – early 1905); faked his own death; briefly served in the French Foreign