Platt, Robert S. (1891 - 1964) [sv]

Robert Swanton Platt (1891-1964) was born in Columbus, Ohio, studied at St. George's School and the Hotchkiss School, and graduated from Yale in 1914. After teaching for a year at Yale in China at Changsha, he returned to the United States to enter the Department of Geography of the University of Chicago in 1915. Despite the interruption of military service during World War I, he completed his Ph.D. and was appointed an instructor in the Department in 1920. For the next thirty-seven years, Platt remained at the University of Chicago as assistant professor (1921-1927), associate professor (1927-1939), professor (1939-1957), and chairman (1949-1957) of the Department of Geography. The central concern of Platt's work as a geographer was the intensive field study of small geographical areas that could provide data to support broader theoretical generalizations on the interrelation of landforms and human occupancy. Beginning in 1920 and continuing for more than thirty years, Platt led graduate students in his field courses on annual summer trips to Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, the upper Great Lakes region, and along the U.S.-Canadian border from Manitoba to Quebec. Conclusions drawn from these studies were distilled for presentation at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers and subsequently published as a regular series of articles in professional journals. Platt followed a similar procedure in surveying Central and South American geography. On seven trips to the Caribbean and Latin America between 1922 and 1941 (each lasting from two to six months), Platt and his wife, Harriet, alternated lengthy traverses of continental regions with careful micro-studies of specific villages and farms. These studies, which eventually numbered nearly one hundred, formed the basis for Platt's monographic text, Latin America: Countrysides and United Regions (1942). In later years, Platt utilized the field methods developed in the 1920's and 1930's to examine a variety of other geographic settings: Tierra del Fuego (1948); the Dutch-German border (1952-1954); the Saarland (1958-1959); volcanic activity in Mexico, Hawaii, and Italy (1958-1960); and Pakistan (1961). In each of these projects, as in the edited collection of essays published as Field Study in American Geography (1958), Platt stressed the spatial complexity of human social and cultural patterns and warned against the conceptual dangers of environmental determinism. While fieldwork formed the foundation of his reputation, Platt was equally well known for his interest in general geographical theory and the development of geography as a professional discipline. From 1923 to 1940, he was a regular participant in the spring field conference of American geographers first organized by Wellington Jones and Carl Sauer. He served the Association of American Geographers for many years as its treasurer (1929-1934), vice-president (1943), president (1945), and as editor of the Annals of the A.A.G. from 1961 to 1964. Outside the discipline, Platt advanced the interests of professional geography as vice-chairman of the Division of Geology and Geography of the National Research Council (1937-1939); as adviser to the Geographer of the U.S. State Department (1943); and most notably as chief of the Division of Maps at the Library of Congress (1944-1945) during Federal wartime mobilization. Even after his retirement in 1957, Platt's interest in professionalism and methodology was reflected in his organization of the Pakistan Field Geographers while a Fulbright Scholar in 1962 and his course on Geographic Thought given as a visiting professor at Indiana University in 1963. (http://ead.lib.uchicago.edu/learn_on3.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.PLATT&q=, 2011-07-01)