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interview
donald worster
Donald Worster has been a powerful voice for environmental history within the United States and around the world for more than three decades. His scholarship, along with his many public talks and addresses, have alerted historians, scientists, policy makers, and environmental activists about the rich insights that our field offers to anyone concerned with the relationship of humans and nature. This interview explores the personal and intellectual sources of Worster's scholarship and thought, and his ideas about future directions of the field.
| Mark Harvey: Your scholarship and teaching in American western and Environmental history no doubt rise partly out of your own past. Tell us about your upbringing in the West and about how your roots shaped your early life. |
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| Donald Worster: My parents were both Kansans; my father grew up not far from Lawrence, my mother in Reno County, which is in the middle of wheat country. They both left the state in the late 1930s because of economic problems and found work picking fruit. My father finally found a railroad job in Needles, California, which was a big center for transcontinental trains on their way to Los Angeles. That's where I was born, about a month before Pearl Harbor. My father joined the Marines, and I didn't see him for four years. During that absence my mother moved back to Kansas where her parents lived and tried to survive on her own. My maternal grandparents basically raised me. When my father came back, I didn't know who this scary man was, carrying a bayonet, flag, and other war souvenirs. |
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My grandparents had a little farm near Hutchinson, Kansas, on Cow Creek, which flows into the Arkansas River. My grandfather was Ben Ball, and my grandmother was Maud Gamble Ball. She was part of a Scottish family that had settled in the western part of the county. Eventually she pulled our whole family into the Scottish Campbellite Church of Christ, the same church that John Muir and Dave Foreman grew up in. I went to school in Hutchinson, a city of 35,000, with a lot of going back and forth to the countryside. My paternal grandmother, LeFaun Starks, lived in the same town. We went to Colorado for summer vacations: to Gunnison, La Junta, and Rocky Mountain National Park. |
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I went to the University of Kansas as an undergraduate, studying little and spending a lot of time in college debate, winning a couple of national championships. It was through the debate team that I met my wife, Beverly Marshall. After marriage, we moved to the University of Maine, where I was debate coach for two years. I thought Maine was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen, far more interesting to me than Colorado. But we left in 1966,when I was admitted into Yale's American Studies Program, opening another new world for me. |
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| Harvey: So you did not have an undergraduate degree in history? |
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| Worster: I have no degrees in history, but I took plenty of history courses, beginning at Kansas with Professor Clifford Griffin, an intellectual historian who drew me into the field. He was still on the faculty when I returned to KU in 1989 to take up my current position as Hall Professor of American History. At Yale, I took seminars with Sydney Ahlstrom and David Hall (in American intellectual history) and L. Franklin Baumer (European intellectual history). Yale was then a rich place for intellectual history—the dominant paradigm in both history and the American studies program. My other professors included Edmund Morgan, Howard Lamar, and C. Vann Woodward. |
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