Grasshopper Geography
Today I launched the latest river history on riverhistories.org featuring none other than the Trinity River. No doubt creating a storyboard about a river that I have spent the past six years studying took less effort than one for rivers about which I had little prior knowledge. One particular piece of advice I received was that I should be careful not to give away all the best parts of my dissertation. I can understand this sentiment that you may want to have people wait to read your published articles or books, but I am also not sure what 'saving the best parts' would even look like. Ultimately my Trinity storyboard reflects change over time from the early 19th century to the mid-20th century and there is only so much one can do in a 15 slide storyboard versus a three-hundred page dissertation/book. Still, this advice made me think what am I "giving away" with this dissertation at any point from the storyboard to the book.
In part this is a question of labor, or six years of my life spent researching, interpreting, and writing. The only way to make an effective argument about this particular river and southern rivers more broadly was to learn everything I could possibly find related to the river. I often frustrated archivists when I told them that I would look at anything they had related to the Trinity River. The research for this project ended up taking me to over fifty archives, including digital ones like the Portal to Texas History, in addition to all the historical commissions collections, state and university libraries in Texas. I found credit reports detailing Trinity River planters and merchants at the Harvard Business School, Cornell had a striking collection of letters from a Trinity River planter to his family in Massachusetts, and even Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Collection had useful sources. Then, the next challenge was what to do with these thousands of documents I collected.
In part, I made sense of my research by comparing it with the existing scholarship on the history of rivers and slavery. Thus I read as many history books related to environmental history, the history of Texas, and the history of slavery as possible. And I decided that quite simply, there is not enough history out there that brings together the history of the environment/rivers and the history of slavery. Furthermore some of the more successful books that do explore this relationship such as Mart Stewart's What Nature Suffers to Croe focus on different parts of the South such as the Georgia lowcountry rather than the frontier of slavery. So my work brings together the history of rivers and slavery in Texas and that in itself is an argument about what we need to focus on.
My dissertation has gone from around five chapters to now ten chapters, and most chapters make their own contribution to our understanding of American history. For example my dissertation shows how planters did not assume they controlled nature in Texas unlike the rice planters of the lowcountry--the control of people and nature did not go hand in hand on the Trinity. At the start of the twentieth century, I argue that townspeople played a key role in preserving access to the commons. This claim stands in contrast to major books like Steve Hahn's The Roots of Southern Populism that point to a conflict between towns and rural people as leading to the closing of the commons. And in the middle of the twentieth century I argue that rural people actively advocated for their environment in very significant ways even if their motivations differed from the people typically labeled as environmentalists. So if you have a stake in environmentalism or common lands or the relationship between the exploitation of people and places then this dissertation then you might find my arguments useful.
And finally, the format of my project speaks to ways in which the pieces are less than the sum total of the book. I am trying to build upon past river histories to make a narrative of the Trinity that brings the role of the river to the forefront in a new and compelling way. I hope that this will not only be a dissertation that some historians find useful, but a book that many people who care about river and justice will want to read.