WE ARE MADE BY HISTORY: ROBERT H. DOTT, JR. (1929-2018) AND THE IMPORTANCE OF LOOKING BACKWARDS (Invited Presentation)

Robert H. (Bob) Dott, Jr. attributed an early interest in history to his parents: his mother, a college history major, and his father, whose “prairie birthright . . . stimulated a lifelong interest in the history of frontier exploration.” His first published historical paper (1969) was on James Hutton’s theory of a dynamic Earth; his history scholarship was also evident in his textbook and teaching of Evolution of the Earth (1971). Dott’s Wisconsin colleague, historian Robert Siegfried (1921-2014), was an early mentor, recruiting Bob’s assistance in transcribing Humphry Davy’s handwritten geology lectures and persuading Dott to develop a history of geology course.

Bob Dott’s interest in the history of stratigraphy and tectonics was focused on North American cases and led to work on James Hall and James Dwight Dana’s development of the geosynclinal concept—which Dott identified as the first geological concept “made in America” and exported to other countries. Other work focused on the roots of sequence stratigraphy from T.C. Chamberlain’s diastrophism to Lawrence Sloss’ contributions to modern concepts. A symposium on eustasy resulted in the first GSA memoir in the history of geology (1992), with the witty subtitle “the historical ups and downs of a major geological concept.”

His historical research extended into legacies of British geologists including William Smith’s stratigraphic sections, Lyell’s fieldwork in America, and Darwin’s geological investigations in South America. Dott also published several short biographies in a number of venues, sketching the lives of sedimentologists, e.g., Joseph Barrell, W.H. Twenhofel and Bob Ginsburg, and petroleum-geology historian Edgar Wesley Owen. In memorializing women geologists with Wisconsin roots, he wrote about Florence Bascom, Emily Hahn, and Katharine Fowler. He served as the Madison, Wisconsin department’s historian for many years.

Bob Dott’s distinguished contributions to historical research were recognized with the 1995 GSA History and Philosophy of Geology (HPGD), now the Mary C. Rabbitt, Award. In 2014, he was awarded the GSA HPGD Friedman Service Award for outstanding service to the community—where his impact and legacy were documented by a crowd of colleagues, students, and fans who came to celebrate with him.