Narrative statement for the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program
University of Missouri-Kansas City
History, coordinating discipline
English, co-discipline
Patrick Dobson
1132 E. 65th St.
Kansas City, MO 64131
816-333-7303
patrickdobson@earthlink.net
Two years after I completed my Master’s thesis (Wyoming, 1993), which focused on post-World War II conservative politics, I walked from Kansas City to Helena, MT, and canoed back home on the Missouri River. I formed a deep fascination and organic connection with the river, which is now my passion.
As a journalist, I have reported and editorialized extensively on American perceptions of rivers, in particular Midwestern views of the Missouri River, as natural and recreational resources. By necessity, I have had to touch on environmental, political, and legal issues, as well as, history, politics, culture, economics, and development.
The Missouri is fertile for deeper historical and literary scholarship. Changing American attitudes toward the nature ideal, the physical environment, and man’s place in both play out on the Missouri River. The Missouri entered the national imagination with the exploits of fur traders and mountain men, the travels and writings of Lewis and Clark and Prince Maximilian Wied-Neuwied, and the paintings of Karl Bodmer and Carl Wimar. It was the road to the West and key to development of a nation. Well into the 20th Century, Midwesterners navigated, intellectually and physically, their region by the river.
But in a changing of American economy and attitudes, the Missouri shifted from the cultural and economic lifeblood of the region to become nearly irrelevant by the turn of the 20th century. Railroads and automobiles had replaced riverboats. The importance of wildlife to the regional and national economy decreased in the closing decades of the 19th century. Farming and industry moved into the easily developable land of the floodplain.
At the same time, Americans put Missouri Basin water to work in irrigating the West. Donald Worster argues in Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West that government and corporate interests who monopolized western water resources controlled the region. These early-20th century irrigation projects proved to many that these elites could be trusted to dominate nature for the advancement of commerce. Early government-backed bank stabilization and flood control efforts on the Missouri were small-scale successes. Henry C. Hart contends in The Dark Missouri that these demonstrated engineers could tackle larger flood control and navigation projects. Federal legislation called for just that, and ultimately to damming the upper river. By 1944, the Congress turned control of the Missouri over to the Corps of Engineers—turning the river into a commercial tool.
In Unruly River: Two Centuries of Change Along the Missouri, Robert Kelley Schneiders argues that government and corporate elites, prompted by grassroots interests on the lower Missouri, sought to domesticate the river—allegedly for the benefit of both groups. But wholesale reengineering of the nature could not take place without alienation from the importance and complexity of the riverine environment. Once severed from the Missouri culturally and economically, society could not have been farther from its banks.
Still, the nature ideal of the river persisted. Fiction and nonfiction about rivers— Granville Stuart’s Diary and Sketchbook of a Journey into America, Samuel Clemmons’ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Colorado River voyages of John Wesley Powell, William Faulkner’s Go Down Moses—turned the 19th and 20th century American imagination. Even so, the nature idea and the environmental reality remained separate. Americans believed that the Missouri, untamed and able to destroy, was evil or dark. Newspaper stories detailed the seeming indiscriminate destructiveness of the river. Editorials called for federal flood control and the channeling the river for freight transportation. Rarely was it mentioned that nature could manage itself, that floodplain development was risky, or that flood was the only natural disaster man could avoid.
Over the last twenty years, the idea of a great mirrored ribbon, rife with history, has reemerged into the regional and national consciousness. The Missouri remains a powerful and active character in this interplay between man and nature. John Thorson in River of Promise, River of Peril: The Politics of Managing the Missouri River argues that government engineers, brimming with confidence, lacked adequate knowledge of damage they might do to the natural environment—which is only now becoming clear. The Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act, and increased interest in conservation efforts have shown light on the detrimental impact of what Hart hails as “engineers’ slipping harness to the river.” Disappearing wildlife, deteriorating water quality, and severe riverbed degradation have become common-citizen concerns.
In addition, increased interest in local and regional history have made the river very real for many people who were, at one time, disconnected from it. New travel works about American rivers, including the Missouri—Peter Holt’s The Big Muddy: Adventures Down the Missouri, Nancy M. Peterson’s People of the Troubled Water: A Missouri River Journal, and William Least Heat Moon’s River-Horse— and recent reporting about them have placed the modern river again in the popular imagination.
The Missouri River fits into the larger setting of late 19th and 20th century American and American Social History. I have much work to do in the literature and historiography of the period, as well as research method and theory, and look forward to core curricula in both History and English for this purpose. I will have to survey fiction, nonfiction, and travel literature regarding American rivers, and the Missouri in particular. I will have to discover the ways in which newspapers in major cities along the river portrayed it, and what it says about those places. I will build on the scholarship Worster, Schneiders, and Thorson have begun. My goal is to write a book that depicts the river as an important and developing part of the American mind.
I have begun to form a good committee for doctoral study at UMKC: English—Robert Unger; History—John Herron and, possibly, Dennis Merrill; American Studies—Mary Ann Wynkoop. UMKC offers access to fine library networks, and newspaper, public, and government archives in Jefferson City, Kansas City, Omaha, and St. Louis. Government agencies, such as the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the Missouri Department of Conservation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Environmental Protection Agency will also be of great use for the dissertation.
Widening the scholarship in the field is not my only goal. A doctorate will also broaden my teaching opportunities. As an instructor at UMKC in Fall 2003 (Introduction to Journalism), I was impressed again to find how much I enjoyed teaching. Moreover, I really care about students. When I stand in front of a classroom of students, I hope they absorb the information and the ability to think critically. I want them to become independent of mind and expression and to be confident as they take that into their worlds. So far, I think students have taken away a great deal. Certainly, I have learned much from them.
As a writing coach and editor, I have worked with journalists to improve their writing, interviewing, and communications skills. I have also taught public school as a substitute, and have experience in public speaking and conducting community college and professional development journalism workshops, and seminars on creative writing and publishing with the Kansas City Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, and Andrews McMeel Publishing.
The Ph.D. also allows access to a wider
world of research and writing. It will increase my credibility as I pursue
scholarly research on subjects for which I find such passion. Apprenticing
under an established scholar will allow me to gain additional skills and
knowledge, adding a layer of credibility to my work. I look forward to being in
the learning and teaching environment, the intellectual challenge, and the
opportunity to spread my enthusiasm for my subjects—both in the academy and
with a higher profile in the community.
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1132 e. 65th st., kansas city, mo 64131,
816-333-7303.