God, P-C. I'm so sorry for all the suckinesh, but you go girl (in a manly way, of course).
They do that? Seriously? That's just... weird.
It's a bit like when my English teachers at uni used to refer to all nineteenth-century literature as 'Victorian'. Eventually I developed some reading skills (and some general knowledge), and started going, dude, Regency is not Victorian, and Austen was not reading Dickens in her spare time, and there's a whole lot of contextual difference there that we should be paying some attention to. Like the Industrial Revolution. Just, you know, for fun.
YES.
These professors of yours are single-handedly destroying the good name of sociology, Shir. I'd be annoyed if I were in your position, too. (There are sociology departments where historical context is appropriately dealt with. Really, there are. They aren't just mythical constructs from a utopian dream of some kind.)
Not all of them, to their defence.
Only the major class of this year. And look, I can control my inner history geek most of the time. Like when my lecturer claimed today that Mary Wollstonecraft was the first who published a feminist text in the age of Enlightenment (let the definition of Enlightenment aside for a moment - hello? Olympe de Gouges? Somebody? 3 years before Wollstonecraft?), but. Marx was not early 20th century character (though yes, you can squeeze Weber into it, but you can't forget that he grew up in the second half of the 19th century.) The beginning of the 20th century was post the industrial age in the west. You cannot rape the scientific revolution into the 19th century, trying to explain rationality and the idea behind scientific experiments.
Sociology has a lot to say. But after sitting in these classes, hearing them bend history beyond recognition, all I want to do is some historical research and forget all about sociology. I'm thinking about talking with one of the lecturers about it, too. In some cases, I can forgive the reduction of the historical background. In other cases, I can say they're pulling it straight out of their asses. Because I haven't read the 1008 pages of this in vain.
Hey, maybe I could inform them there is a valid background in historical research of calling 1853 - 1991 "The long 20th century", but other than that (of which they don't use), there's not much between historical facts and what they teach.