Though courses in economics were given in the University almost from the first and; in fact, with International Law, formed the special field of work assumed by Dr. Angell for some years, the Department of Political Economy as such was not organized until after Henry C. Adams, Iowa College, '74, who came to the University as a lecturer in 1881, accepted the chair of Political Economy in 1887. The first step toward a chair in Sociology came with the appointment in 1899 of Charles Horton Cooley, '87, a son of Judge Thomas M. Cooley, of the first Law Faculty, as Assistant Professor of Sociology, from which position he rose to a full professorship in eight years. A separate chair of Political Science was not created until 1910, when Jesse Siddall Reeves, Amherst, '91, came as the head of the new department. The Department of Music had its first beginning with the appointment of Calvin Brainerd Cady, Oberlin, '74, as instructor in 1880. He became Acting Professor of Music in 1885, but resigned three years later when Albert A. Stanley, Leipzig, '75, came as the head of the Department and a few years later Director of the University School of Music, now closely associated with the work of the University though not in any way a part of it. After the disappearance from the Faculty roll of the name of the Detroit portrait painter, Alvah Bradish, who apparently gave a few lectures on Fine Arts during the period from 1852 to 1863, no work in fine arts was given until the appointment of Professor Herbert R. Cross, Brown, '00, in 1911. The work in elocution and oratory was definitely established with the appointment in 1889 of Thomas C. Trueblood, M.A., Earlham, '85, who had for some years held a lectureship in the University, as Assistant Professor of Elocution and in 1892 as full Professor of Oratory.
The chair of Semitics and Oriental Languages, held since 1914 by Leroy Waterman, Hillsdale, '98, was first established in 1893 when James A. Craig, McGill, '80, came as Professor of Oriental Languages, a title which was changed to Semitic Languages and Literatures and Hellenistic Greek the following year.
Following the example of Yale and Cornell, Michigan established a Department of Forestry in 1903, and called Filibert Roth, '90, to fill the chair thus created. For some time courses in forestry had been given in connection with the work in botany, but the growing interest in the preservation and conservation of America's timber resources made more intensive and systematic training seem desirable. A few years later, in 1909, a course in landscape design was established, which shortly became a department under the charge of Professor Aubrey Tealdi, a graduate of the Royal Technical Institute of Livorno, Italy.