Leslie A. White, a middle child, was born on January 20, 1900 in Salida, Colorado, to parents, Alvin White and Mildred Millard. Alfred White worked with various railroad companies and Mildred Millard was a stay at home mother. White's father believed in hard work and did not believe in spending very much time with his wife and children. In 1905, when White was five years old, his parents divorced and their father gained custody. White's father uprooted the family and moved them to Kansas City, Missouri in order to take a more significant office job with the Denver and Rio Grande railroad company. Alvin White became dissatisfied with working indoors all the time and made the decision in 1906, to move the family once again, this time to a farm
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The farm life was disrupted when Helen, White's older sister, became pregnant at the age of seventeen. White's family moved from town to town for a year because their father did not want people to discover her “condition”due to the stigma around Helen being so young and not being married, finally settling in Zachary, Louisiana. White associates this transient period with the reason he became estranged from both his father and younger brother, Willard. White had made plans to major in physics at Louisiana State college, but these plans were put to a halt when he enlisted in the Navy at the beginning of World War I. While in the Navy, White became interested in issues of human behavior, learning that the things he had been taught was simply “...a gross distortion of reality.” After the war, White enrolled into Louisiana State college, this time majoring in psychology and sociology, graduating with his bachelors in 1923, and then receiving his masters from Columbia one year later. Even though White attended Columbia at the same time as Franz Boas was a professor, he was never was taught by Boas, but rather by a Boassian student by the name of Alexander …show more content…
When finally, after some issues with students not grasping his teachings during his lectures at the University of Michigan, White went back and read the writings of Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer, and found that their theories had truth to them with only a few details wrong. The general idea from these writings, that culture evolved from simple forms into complex forms, seemed to hold truth to White. In developing his own big ideas about cultures, White kept one hint of Boassian teachings in he stated that all cultures are sui generis, or unique, as well as the idea of Kroeber's “super organic” understanding, moving the study focus from individuals to more generalized groups. For the time period in which White was studying, his theories and methodologies of how culture operated were considered unconventional. White's first big idea was that of culturology, if cultures were sui generis, unique, then all cultures could be studied by looking at cultural patterns. His second big idea was where White became unconventional. The second big idea stated that the cultural patterns needed to study cultures could be found by rearranging the second law of thermodynamics, entropy is increasing while biology is decreasing, implementing negative entropy. White believed that humans had replaced the biological aspect of the law with culture thus making the law, entropy
The farm life was disrupted when Helen, White's older sister, became pregnant at the age of seventeen. White's family moved from town to town for a year because their father did not want people to discover her “condition”due to the stigma around Helen being so young and not being married, finally settling in Zachary, Louisiana. White associates this transient period with the reason he became estranged from both his father and younger brother, Willard. White had made plans to major in physics at Louisiana State college, but these plans were put to a halt when he enlisted in the Navy at the beginning of World War I. While in the Navy, White became interested in issues of human behavior, learning that the things he had been taught was simply “...a gross distortion of reality.” After the war, White enrolled into Louisiana State college, this time majoring in psychology and sociology, graduating with his bachelors in 1923, and then receiving his masters from Columbia one year later. Even though White attended Columbia at the same time as Franz Boas was a professor, he was never was taught by Boas, but rather by a Boassian student by the name of Alexander …show more content…
When finally, after some issues with students not grasping his teachings during his lectures at the University of Michigan, White went back and read the writings of Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer, and found that their theories had truth to them with only a few details wrong. The general idea from these writings, that culture evolved from simple forms into complex forms, seemed to hold truth to White. In developing his own big ideas about cultures, White kept one hint of Boassian teachings in he stated that all cultures are sui generis, or unique, as well as the idea of Kroeber's “super organic” understanding, moving the study focus from individuals to more generalized groups. For the time period in which White was studying, his theories and methodologies of how culture operated were considered unconventional. White's first big idea was that of culturology, if cultures were sui generis, unique, then all cultures could be studied by looking at cultural patterns. His second big idea was where White became unconventional. The second big idea stated that the cultural patterns needed to study cultures could be found by rearranging the second law of thermodynamics, entropy is increasing while biology is decreasing, implementing negative entropy. White believed that humans had replaced the biological aspect of the law with culture thus making the law, entropy