Upper Peninsula of Michigan Historic Photos from the Robert S. Platt Collection Volume 45 

Upper Peninsula of Michigan Historic Photos from the Robert S. Platt Collection Volume 45
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's skill as a teacher and his generous encouragement of the work of others contributed to the high regard in which he was held by both students and colleagues. Together with Harriet, he opened his home at 10820 S. Drew to successive generations of foreign and American students in geography and other fields, many of who lived with the Platts for more than a year and came to style themselves "Plattaches." The Platt home was also the scene of frequent gatherings of Department of Geography faculty, staff, students, and alumni, and of meetings with geographers from other universities. Following Platt's death in 1964, several of these friends and colleagues joined in erecting a monument in his memory in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, on the site of his earliest contributions to field methodology and in tribute to the teacher and scholar who represented "in remarkable degree," as Richard Hartshorne has noted, "the development of American geography during his lifetime."
Music by Scott Buckley