Gordon Barlow Dodds

Background

Dodds was born on March 12, 1932, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, though he grew up in Pennsylvania.

Education

Dodds was a graduate of Harvard, earning a Bachelor of Arts there in 1954 before attending graduate school at the University of Illinois. He received his Master of Arts at Illinois in 1955, followed by a Ph.D. in 1958 from the University of Wisconsin.

Career

After graduation, Dodds joined the faculty at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, as a history instructor, later becoming an associate professor there from 1964 to 1966. He moved to Portland next to become an associate professor of history at Portland State College (now University). Dodds was chair of the history department at PSU from 1996 until 1999, retiring the next year.

Dodds was instrumental in the election by the PSU faculty of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as its collective bargaining agent in 1977. When AAUP's first president fell ill, Dodds became the union's leader. On his retirement, he was appointed university archivist, a position he filled until his death. In 1979, PSU bestowed on him the first Branford P. Millar Award for Faculty Excellence. He also won the PSU Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Service Award for 1997-1998.

Most interested in the history of Oregon and the Northwest in general, he was the author of several books, including The Salmon King of Oregon, Oregon: A Bicentennial History, and The American Northwest: A History of Oregon and Washington. His last book, published in 2000, was The College That Would Not Die: The First Fifty Years of Portland State University, 1946-1996.

A distinguished teacher, Dodds received awards for education excellence, including the Branford P. Millar Award for Faculty Excellence in 1979, and the Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Service Award from PSU in 1998.

Achievements

• Dodds is best remembered as a leading historian of the westward movement, the Pacific Northwest, and the state of Oregon. A prolific scholar, he was the author, co-author, or editor of ten books.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Varieties of Hope: An Anthology of Oregon Prose

    (This wide-ranging anthology of speeches, essays, and work...)

    1993
  • Oregon: A History

    (To many Americans, Oregon is an idyllic, fruitful garden ...)

    1977
  • The Salmon King of Oregon

    (This study attempts to fill some gaps in American economi...)

    1959

Views

In his 1977 book, Oregon, Dodds laid out his signature argument concerning Oregon’s history - that the state’s deeply ambivalent political culture of progressivism at the margins and conservatism at the core was the mainspring of its historical development. He elaborated this view in that work and others, but perhaps most succinctly in a speech, “The Burden of Oregon History,” delivered at the Washington County Historical Society in 1986. In it he defined the South in terms of its historical encumbrance of shame and guilt deriving from slavery, Civil War defeat, and occupation. In contrast, Oregon’s political culture, Dodds said, was shaped by its successes - the crossing of the Oregon Trail, the so-called Oregon System (initiative, referendum, and recall), woman suffrage, and environmental legislation such as the bottle bill. But these triumphs, he maintained, had created not a striving and achieving society, but one that had become in the twentieth century increasingly self-satisfied and static.

References

• Contemporary Authors Volume 221
  2004