Communities of early ecologists: The use of internet and archival resources to reconstruct ecologist communities at the founding of the Ecological Society of America

Background/Question/Methods

The explosion of available digital records has dramatically affected the ease, efficiency, and breadth of research possibilities for ecologists interested in exploring historical questions. Members of the Historical Records Committee took on the challenge of seeing what we could discover about the ~307 ESA "Charter Members" by using Internet resources, supplemented in a few cases by easily-accessible physical archival records. Initial results were presented at ESA in 2012; here we focus on the significance of a particular place (St. Louis) in interactions leading to individuals deciding to become members of the newly-forming Society. Our starting point was information collected from charter members themselves in 1916 and published in the 1917 ESA Handbook, now available online. Additional internet resources included city directories, small town newspapers, census records, newsletters, meeting programs, archival finding aids, genealogical resources, and a wide variety of digitized scholarly publications and ephemera. 

Results/Conclusions

Our attempts to clarify or expand initial information led to unexpected insights into early ecologist communities and ESA. For example, ESA charter member C. H. Turner, the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (magna cum laude, 1907), was a civil rights activist and internationally known behavioral entomologist high school teacher at the time ESA formed. His younger colleagues and friends Phil and Nellie Rau were husband and wife collaborators who had just completed four years of field work with very young twin boys in tow, resulting in the co-authored publication Wasp Studies Afield (1918). Phil Rau's formal education had ended after fourth grade, and Nellie Rau's college degree was in library studies. The institution chiefly responsible for bringing these and other ecologists together was the St. Louis Academy of Science, where "elite amateurs" and professionals supported each other in research as well as activity in national scientific organizations. Notably, Turner, the African-American high school teacher, had been a research mentor and friend to other St. Louis ecologists and active in other national societies (including as officer) before joining ESA. Each St. Louis charter member had professional connections beyond the city and state, and shared these contacts locally. Our examination of other charter members and a re-analysis of basic membership parameters suggest the surprising diversity of backgrounds and connections of early ESA members in St. Louis was not atypical of other localities and thus any institutional history of ESA would benefit from inclusion of micro-historical approaches. Our results depart in significant ways from the histories of Shelford and Burgess, for example, in part because of information and techniques not available to them.