American Psychology, 1900-1922

This is psychology before it became polite: raw, arguing with itself, still deciding what it wanted to be. These are the actual journal articles where America's first psychologists did their thinking in public. William James lays out functionalism as a radical alternative to European structuralism. John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner's 1920 'Little Albert' study appears here in full, the notorious experiment that turned a infant into a case study in conditioned fear and sparked decades of ethical debate. The collection also recovers the voices often written out of the discipline's history: early feminist psychologists contributing to educational psychology while battling for legitimacy in male-dominated academia. You'll find pragmatism and behaviorism in tension, the birth of experimental methods, and the field's anxious push to be seen as a real science. For anyone curious about where psychology came from, this is the unfiltered primary source - messy, brilliant, and sometimes uncomfortable.