Denison University, Granville, Ohio, United States
Johnson entered Denison University at the age of eighteen.
Gallery of Douglas Johnson
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
Johnson transferred from Denison University to the University of New Mexico, where he assisted its president, Clarence Luther Herrick, himself late of Denison University, in his summer geological fieldwork. Herrick’s humane scientific influence led Johnson to take up geology; he subsequently pursued graduate work at Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 1903.
Gallery of Douglas Johnson
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Johnson continued his studies in physical geography at Harvard, where he came under the influence of W. M. Davis, whose upbringing and intellect were much like his own, and he was greatly inspired by Davis’ sharpness of reasoning and by the clarity and effectiveness of his written and graphic exposition.
Career
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Legion of Honor
Johnson was named chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
Johnson transferred from Denison University to the University of New Mexico, where he assisted its president, Clarence Luther Herrick, himself late of Denison University, in his summer geological fieldwork. Herrick’s humane scientific influence led Johnson to take up geology; he subsequently pursued graduate work at Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 1903.
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Johnson continued his studies in physical geography at Harvard, where he came under the influence of W. M. Davis, whose upbringing and intellect were much like his own, and he was greatly inspired by Davis’ sharpness of reasoning and by the clarity and effectiveness of his written and graphic exposition.
(This is a fantastic book about the battles and battlefiel...)
This is a fantastic book about the battles and battlefields from the ground-level view. It is very mat-of-fact in tone and brims with information not found elsewhere on these deadly battles. It includes important terrain photos, meant to be tactical impressions.
Douglas Wilson Johnson was an American geographer who specialized in geomorphology. He known for his contributions to the understanding of coastal processes and landforms.
Background
Ethnicity:
Johnson was a descendant of a slave-holding American family of English roots.
Douglas Wilson Johnson was born on November 30, 1878, in Parkersburg, West Virginia, United States. His father, Isaac H. Johnson, a farmer-turned-lawyer, died when the boy was twelve, leaving his upbringing to his mother, Jennie A. Wilson, an intellectual who was a leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and an advocate of women’s suffrage.
Education
Johnson entered Denison University at the age of eighteen. He had never been robust and, fearing tuberculosis, transferred to the University of New Mexico, where he assisted its president, Clarence Luther Herrick, himself late of Denison University, in his summer geological fieldwork. Herrick’s humane scientific influence led Johnson to take up geology; he subsequently pursued graduate work at Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 1903.
Taking up an instructorship in geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johnson continued his studies in physical geography at Harvard, where he came under the influence of W. M. Davis, whose upbringing and intellect were much like his own, and he was greatly inspired by Davis’ sharpness of reasoning and by the clarity and effectiveness of his written and graphic exposition.
In 1907 Johnson moved to Harvard as assistant professor of geology; two years later he edited an important collection of Davis’ works, Geographical Essays (1909), thereby perpetuating Davis’ earlier writings, on which later generations of geomorphologists were to draw, to the virtual exclusion of Davis’ important later work.
In 1911 Johnson received a grant from the Shaler Memorial Fund to study the whole eastern shoreline of the United States and that of parts of western Europe. He had already published work on beach processes and sea-level changes, topics he pursued until World War II. After moving to Columbia University, first as associate professor in 1912 and then as professor in 1919, he devoted much time to these topics and in 1919 published his important book Shore Processes and Shoreline Development, notable for the completeness of its review of the literature and, particularly, for its detailed elaboration of the idea of F. P. Gulliver, Davis’ only Ph.D. student, that the cyclic concept should be applied to shoreline evolution and classification. This work was followed by a regional application of these principles in The New England-Acadian Shoreline (1925).
These marine interests were largely instrumental in the setting up of the National Research Council’s Committee on Shoreline Investigations in 1923 with Johnson as chairman; it concerned itself with studies of mean sea level (on which Johnson published some fourteen papers between 1910 and 1930) and with coastal protection. He developed an interest in the formation and correlation of marine terraces: his “Principles of Marine Level Correlation” (1932) was followed by some seven other papers on the study of Pleistocene and Pliocene terraces. He also served as president of the International Geographical Union’s commission on the subject from 1934 to 1938. In 1939 Johnson published Origin of Submarine Canyons, reviewing the large number of hypotheses which had been proposed and tentatively suggesting a working hypothesis that involved the sapping action of submarine artesian springs.
Johnson’s orderly, authoritarian outlook led him to take a profound interest in the course of World War I, particularly in the way in which military operations were affected by terrain. His anti-German views were reflected in his election as chairman in 1916 of the executive committee of the American Rights League, which sought American entry into the war; and there is little doubt that his influence on the elderly W. M. Davis did much to widen the academic breach which had developed between the latter and Albrecht and Walther Penck.
Johnson’s political and scholarly views were reflected in his many contributions to what was then termed “military geography.” In 1917 he published Topography and Strategy in the War and received a commission as major in the intelligence division of the U.S. Army before proceeding to Europe to study firsthand the influence of landforms on modern warfare. This interest culminated in his Battlefields of the World War (1921). He returned to Columbia University in 1920, and in 1923-1924 he lectured on American geomorphology at several French universities; he published the substance of his lectures in Paysages et problèmes géographiques de la terre américaine (1927).
It is for his work in geomorphology, fluvial as well as coastal, that Johnson is remembered most. Early in his career he wrote “The Tertiary History of the Tennessee River” and he continued to contribute articles on a wide variety of geomorphic topics virtually until his death. Particularly notable are “Baselevel” (1929), “Géomorphologie Aspects of Rift Valleys” (1931), “Streams and Their Significance” (1932), and several ascribing the origin of pediments primarily to lateral stream corrasion (1931, 1932). In his more advanced years, particularly after Davis’ death in 1934, Johnson occupied the position of America’s most influential geomorphologist, passing critical judgments on his contemporaries.
Johnson chose for his major and most lasting contribution a return to the denudation chronology of the central and northern Appalachians made classic forty years before by Davis’ two brilliant papers, “The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania” and “The Rivers of Northern New Jersey.” Two circumstances permitted him to produce a more streamlined and satisfying theoretical history of Appalachian geomorphology than had Davis.
First he was free from the necessity of assuming the existence of Appalachia with an initial east-west drainage, the subsequent reversal of which had to be accounted for. Second, he saw that the situation would be greatly simplified if it could be assumed that the sub-Cretaceous unconformity of the coastal plain (the Fall Zone peneplain) was of different age from the summit peneplain of the Appalachians further west (the Schooley peneplain). Johnson’s Stream Sculpture on the Atlantic Slope (1931) ranks with the work of H. Baulig on the Massif Central and of S. W. Wooldridge and D. L. Linton on Southeast England as one of the masterpieces of denudation chronology. In it, with highly effective writing and use of block diagrams, he pictures the development of the complex relief and drainage of the region through a series of rational steps.
His masterstroke was to postulate a widespread Cretaceous marine cover over the Fall Zone peneplain which was subsequently upwarped and from which eastward-flowing rivers were superimposed on the underlying structures; there followed a series of discontinuous diastrophic uplifts which were responsible for the successive Schooley, Harrisburg, and Somerville surfaces.
Johnson was an unswerving disciple of Davis, disagreeing with him only on the spelling of the word “peneplain.”
He followed Davis’ interest in the influence of the Appalachian topography on the course of the American Civil War.
In his extensive review of European geography, he argued forcefully that geomorphology be viewed as part of geology rather than geography.
Membership
Johnson was president of both the Geological Society of America and the Association of American Geographers.
Personality
It was from this background that Johnson developed the sharp legalistic mind, love of order, self-discipline, and emotional austerity which characterized both his dealings with his colleagues and his scholarship.
He was an energetic and meticulous teacher much influenced at Harvard by the mercurial Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. He conducted field trips with almost regimental efficiency and produced a constant stream of Ph.D.'s beginning with Armin K. Lobeck.
Physical Characteristics:
In 1912, after a summer spent in part in the field, Mexico and Arizona, Johnson suffered a severe heart attack, while visiting his beloved Granville. Recovery was slow, but living strictly according to doctor's orders, he regained strength steadily.
Connections
In 1903 Johnson married Alice Adkins, the daughter of a Baptist preacher. The deep love between these two sustained them through thirty-five years of marriage. During most of this time, Alice was totally blind. Triumphing over her affliction, Alice was his companion on worldwide travels and Johnson never recovered from her death in 1938.
While visiting a niece in Louisville, Kentucky, he had met Edith Sanford Caldwell, the widow of Dr. M. A. Caldwell, who had been head of the department of psychology in the University of Louisville. This acquaintance had become a friendship which held promise of happy companionship. On September 8, 1943, Edith Caldwell became Mrs. Johnson. Proudly Johnson brought her to New York and introduced her to his circle of friends. Three months later they started south to spend the winter in Florida. On the way down, their train was involved in a wreck which cost the lives of at least eighty-two fellow passengers.
The five sons from his first marriage and two from the second became farmers; of the others, four turned to law, one ran a village store, and one entered the ministry. The latter, Thomas Carskadon Johnson, was for many years the leading Baptist clergyman in West Virginia, pastor of the First Baptist Church at Charleston. The most prominent of those who made law their profession were Okey Johnson, Chief Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court and later dean of the Law School of the West Virginia State University, and David Johnson of Parkersburg, West Virginia. The youngest of the sons who turned to farming, Daniel Dye Johnson, had also studied law. He did much to foster scientific agriculture in his state and eventually helped to establish a department of agriculture at the University of West Virginia.