George Elliott Howard

George Elliott Howard (1849–1928) was an American historian and sociologist. Born in Saratoga, New York, and raised in Nebraska, he studied at the University of Nebraska and in Germany and taught at Nebraska and then at Stanford, which he left in 1901 in protest at the dismissal of the economist Edward Ross. He returned to Nebraska in 1904 and founded its department of sociology. His three-volume History of Matrimonial Institutions (1904) was the first thorough study of the law and custom of marriage and divorce in England and the United States, and he served as president of the American Sociological Society in 1917.