James McKeen Cattell is the first professor…
1891 CE
James McKeen Cattell is the first professor of psychology in the United States.
After completing his Ph.D. with Wundt in Germany in 1886, Cattell took up a lecturing post at the University of Cambridge in England, and became a 'Fellow Commoner' of St John's College, Cambridge.
He made occasional visits to America where he gave lectures at Bryn Mawr and the University of Pennsylvania.
He had returned in 1889 to the United States to take up the post of Professor of Psychology in Pennsylvania, and in 1891 moves to Columbia University where he becomes Department Head of Psychology, Anthropology, and Philosophy.
He will become President of the American Psychological Association in 1895.
From the beginning of his career, Cattell has worked hard to establish psychology as a field as worthy of study as any of the "hard" physical sciences, such as chemistry or physics
Indeed, he believes that further investigation will reveal that the intellect itself can be parsed into standard units of measurements.
He also brings the methods of Wilhelm Wundt and Francis Galton back to the United States, establishing the mental testing efforts in the U.S.
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Northern North America
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