Recap of the Texas History Forum, “Historic Cemeteries Bus Tour”

Sherri Driscoll, Alamo Museum Educator, with Forum participants in front of Clara Driscoll’s tomb.

Armed with sunscreen, plenty of water, and comfortable shoes, attendees at the May 5 Texas History Forum enjoyed a bus tour of six Texas cemeteries. At each site, they, accompanied by Library staff members, visited the final resting places of well-known and obscure Texans, including government officials and businessmen, soldiers and generals, scholars and preservationists, and athletes and artists.

Ernesto Rodriguez, Alamo Assistant Curator, talked about Robert Gillespie and Samuel H. Walker at the Odd Fellows Cemetery.

Stops on the tour included:

• Alamo Masonic Lodge Cemetery, San Antonio: graves of Clara Driscoll, John Lang Sinclair, Sandra Ilene West, and Caiaphas Ham

• Independent Order of Odd Fellows San Antonio Lodge No. 11 Cemetery, San Antonio: graves of Robert Addison Gillespie and Samuel H. Walker and the purported burial place of the Alamo defenders

• San Antonio National Cemetery: graves of George E. M. Kelly, John Lapham Bullis, and buffalo soldiers

• City Cemetery No. 1, San Antonio: graves of William A. Menger, Lincoln Borglum, and members of the Steves, Guenther, and Maverick families

• St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, San Antonio: grave of Adina De Zavala

• Texas State Cemetery, Austin: graves of or monuments to Albert Sidney Johnston, Joanna Troutman, Walter Prescott Webb, James Frank Dobie, Stephen F. Austin, William P. Hardeman, William A. A. “Big Foot” Wallace, Susanna Dickinson, William P. Zuber, Edward Burleson, Bob Bullock, Minerva Fannin, Barbara Jordan, John B. Connally, Tom Landry, Ann Richards, Charlie Wilson, and Willie Wells

Ernesto Rodriguez, Alamo Assistant Curator, and Sherri Driscoll, Alamo Museum Educator, led the tour and provided information about each Texan whose grave we visited.

Forum participants near the headstone of John L. Bullis in the San Antonio National Cemetery.

Anyone interested in learning more about the individuals listed above are welcome to visit the DRT Library and explore the archival collections, vertical files, and other materials we have by, to, or about them. Additional resources at the Library describe archaeological excavations undertaken at Texas cemeteries or include transcriptions of cemetery records.

Forum attendees learned about the founder of the Menger Hotel, located just south of the Alamo, from Ernesto Rodriguez.

Attendees appreciated the shade near the graves of Carl Hilmar Guenther and his family.

Sherri Driscoll presented information about Samuel Augustus Maverick and his famly.

Arriving at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.

The Susanna Dickinson cenotaph in the Texas State Cemetery; she is buried in Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery.

Texas History Forum, “Historic Cemeteries Bus Tour,” to be Held on May 5

The DRT Library will be holding its twenty-fifth Texas History Forum on Saturday, May 5, 2012. Different from previous Forums, this year’s event will feature a guided bus tour of the final resting places of many individuals who made Texas history. We’ll be visiting several historic cemeteries in the area, including:

• City Cemetery No. 1, San Antonio
• Alamo Masonic Cemetery, San Antonio
• Independent Order of Odd Fellows San Antonio Lodge No. 11 Cemetery, San Antonio
• San Antonio National Cemetery, San Antonio
• St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, San Antonio
• Texas State Cemetery, Austin

Registration is $35 per person, which includes a box lunch to be provided on the bus. Seating is limited and pre-registration is required. Reservations will remain open as long as seating is available.

Please note that much of this event will take place outside and require a lot of walking on uneven terrain; casual dress and comfortable shoes are recommended.

See the library’s website to learn more about this year’s Texas History Forum and download a copy of the registration form. Please call (210) 225-1071 or email drtl@drtl.org if you have additional questions about this event.

24th Texas History Forum, “Unsung Heroes of the Texas Revolution,” to be Held on March 26

The DRT Library will be holding its twenty-fourth Texas History Forum on Saturday, March 26, 2011, in Alamo Hall, adjacent to the Library on the Alamo grounds. Entitled “Unsung Heroes of the Texas Revolution,” this year’s Forum will feature presentations by four distinguished historians, Alwyn Barr, Jesús F. de la Teja, Francis X. Galán, and Dora Guerra.

Seating is limited and pre-registration is advised. Registration is $20 per person. Reservations will remain open as long as seating is available.

Proceeds in excess of expenses will benefit the DRT Library’s Herpich Restoration and Conservation Fund.

Visit the library’s website to see an event schedule, download a registration form, and read biographies of the special guest speakers. You can also call (210) 225-1071 or email drtl@drtl.org for additional information about this year’s Texas History Forum.

Elaine B. Davis Research Award Winner Announced

Former DRT Library Director Elaine Davis, left, and current Director, Leslie Stapleton, right. Mrs. Davis accepted the research award at the Texas History Forum on behalf of the winner, Julia Brookins.

At this year’s Texas History Forum, Julia Brookins was announced as the winner of the second Elaine B. Davis Research Award. Ms. Brookins is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago; the award will enable her to conduct research for her dissertation, Immigrant Settlers and Frontier Citizens: German Texas in the American Empire, 1844-1898.

In her application for the Davis award, Ms. Brookins described her project and the significance of accessing materials, particularly unique archival collections, at the DRT Library.

My doctoral research focuses new attention on the relationship between two central narratives of the nineteenth-century United States: continental territorial expansion and the integration of mass migrations from Europe.

Throughout the decades of mass immigration to the United States, the nation consolidated its authority in the new territories of the West and the Southwest. The United States worked to bind these lands to the national core. How did this expansionist project influence the way that European immigrants understood American society and adapted to it? To answer this question, I am focusing on the experiences of Germans in Texas, which was a new state in 1845 and one that played a critical role in America’s conquests…

In studying [the period] from Texan statehood in the 1840s until the frontier ‘closed’ and U.S. imperialists redirected their energies overseas in the 1890s, I concentrate on two important aspects of immigrant acculturation: the experience for the German migrants and the consequences for others [i.e. racial minorities such as Tejanos, Mexicans, African Americans, and American Indians]…

The completed dissertation will not only contribute to Texas history; it will also provide a unique yet feasible case study of a process that unfolded throughout the United States in the nineteenth century, as Europeans became Americans in lands that were themselves just becoming parts of the United States.

I visited the DRT Library at the Alamo for a short time this winter, and the funds from the Davis Research Award would allow me to return to San Antonio and examine a number of specific collections, documents, books, and visual materials I was unable to study before. I located a number of rare and unique items there which would add considerably to the depth and scope of my dissertation, including the Eugen Staffel letters, the Herff and Duerler families papers, and the [George Frederic] Oheim papers. I look forward to the possibility of incorporating more of the Library’s lively and important collections into my doctoral dissertation.

The Elaine B. Davis Research Award, endowed by the 2007-2009 DRT Library Committee chaired by Connie Impelman and sponsored by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, is awarded to bring scholars to San Antonio, Texas, to work with the unique materials housed at the Library. Mrs. Davis served as Director of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library from 1998 until 2008.

Recap of the Texas History Forum, “Historiography: Texas History Detectives”

DRT Library Director Leslie Stapleton with, from left to right, Dr. Gregg Cantrell, Dr. James E. Crisp, and Dr. Light T. Cummins.

Last Saturday, May 22, the DRT Library held its twenty-third Texas History Forum. Entitled “Historiography: Texas History Detectives,” the program featured three speakers who explored various aspects of the history of Texas history.

Dr. Light T. Cummins, a professor of history at Austin College and the State Historian of Texas, explored historiography in general; the differences between and intersections of myth, memory, and history; and broad contours in the history of Texas historical writing. Henderson Yoakum‘s two-volume History of Texas from Its First Settlement in 1685 to Its Annexation to the United States in 1846 (1855) was the first major history of Texas. In focusing on Anglo Americans in Texas, this work set the tone of early histories about the state. In the early 1900s, the University of Texas at Austin (UT) emerged as the center for Texas history scholarship. By mid-century, however, a fundamental reorientation in histories about Texas reflected changes occurring in the state and in the historical discipline. UT’s preeminence was diminished as scholars at other universities began writing about Texas history. Moreover, the New Social History that resulted in large part from the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s expanded the boundaries of historical investigation to include ordinary people; the histories of women and various racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic groups; and human activity beyond military, political, and economic pursuits. This paradigm shift meant that historians writing about Texas history broadened their focus beyond the experiences of Anglo Americans.

Dr. Cummins observed that contemporary public memory does not always match current historical writing about Texas and that it is difficult to reconcile the traditional monolithic, Anglo view of Texas history still held by some people with the New Social History. Moreover, asserted Dr. Cummins, there is a disconnect between modern Texas historiography and public memory. Whereas earlier historiography supported the public memory narrative, current historiography questions it, a situation those who defend public memory find disconcerting.

DRT Library Director Leslie Stapleton with volunteer Glen Skaggs, whose generous donation in memory of his wife, Rosemary Hoffman Skaggs, funded the speakers' travel arrangements.

Dr. Gregg Cantrell, a professor of history at Texas Christian University, discussed the work of historian-biographers through the case study of his work Stephen F. Austin, Empresario of Texas. He began by examining the two primary types of biographies. On one hand is biography as history. In these works, the story of an individual, usually a famous person, is used as a vehicle for exploring a broader historical context. Consequently, these works focus on the public life of the subject and pay little attention to his or her private life. Eugene C. Barker’s The Life of Stephen F. Austin (1925) is the only other biography of Austin besides Dr. Cantrell’s work and is “a classic of this genre.” The other type of biography is what Dr. Cantrell called the “whole enchilada” approach. Here, the author works to describe the public and private life of the subject and to capture his/her complexity with special attention to his/her motivations, personality, and character. Dr. Cantrell’s biography of Austin fits within this second category. He asserted that, like historians, biographers are detectives. However, because biographers work to solve the ultimate riddle – the inner-workings of the human heart and mind – they face additional challenges in understanding their subject. Within this framework, Dr. Cantrell described how he used extant evidence to formulate educated guesses about Stephen F. Austin’s relationship with his father, Moses, and his cousin, Mary Austin Holley.

Presenting the final lecture of this year’s Forum, Dr. James E. Crisp, a professor of history at North Carolina State University, touched on some of the topics explored in his works Sleuthing the Alamo and How Did Davy Die? And Why Do We Care So Much? Dr. Crisp stated that people who lived in the past leave only evidence that is highly problematic, fragmentary, full of distortions and perhaps lies, self-contradictory, and incomplete. Looking for clues about the past, stated Dr. Crisp, does not lead to other historians’ work but leads to primary sources held in archives or private collections as well as scientific or archaeological evidence. When scholars dig into these materials, he asserted, “the story changes”; this is why, by definition, all historians are revisionist scholars. Using these ideas as a foundation, Dr. Crisp analyzed some of the problems presented by Sam Houston’s speech to volunteer soldiers near Refugio in January 1836; the diary of José Enrique de la Peña; and George M. Dolson’s letter, published in the (Detroit) Democratic Free Press on September 7, 1836.

Thank you to all of our speakers for their compelling and thought-provoking talks!

23rd Texas History Forum to be Held on May 22

The DRT Library will be holding its twenty-third Texas History Forum on Saturday, May 22, 2010, in Alamo Hall on the Alamo Complex. Entitled “Historiography: Texas History Detectives,” this year’s Forum will feature presentations by three distinguished historians, Gregg Cantrell, James E. Crisp, and Light T. Cummins.

Seating is limited and pre-registration is advised. Registration is $20 per person. Reservations will remain open as long as seating is available.

Proceeds in excess of expenses will benefit the library’s operations endowment fund.

Visit the library’s website to see an event schedule, download a registration form, and read biographies of the special guest speakers. You can also call (210) 225-1071 or email drtl@drtl.org for additional information about this year’s Texas History Forum.

What is historiography?

Historiography is the history of historical writing, specifically the history of how scholars have interpreted historical topics over time. In order to understand this, historiography also necessitates the study of why historians have chosen to examine and describe the past in particular ways.

The need for historiography arises from the dichotomy between two definitions of history: on one hand is history as the irreversible, unchangeable past and on the other is history as the dynamic process by which subsequent generations analyze, interpret, and communicate about the past. “The past will never change, but the ways we think about it have never stopped changing,” writes Adam Budd in the preface to The Modern Historiography Reader (xiii). Other historians agree that their discipline is characterized by change. “Revising interpretations of the past is intrinsic to the study of history,” asserts Eric Foner in the historiographical essay that serves as the preface of Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (xvii). Likewise, in History in Crisis? Norman J. Wilson states that

history is best defined as a continual, open-ended process of argument. No question is closed because any problem can be reopened by finding new evidence or by taking a new look at old evidence. Thus there are no final answers, only good, coherent arguments: history is not some irreducible list of ‘the facts’ but continually changing bodies of evidence (3).

Why do people, especially historians, change their interpretations about the past? Norman J. Wilson provides a few answers: historians’ “perspectives change as a result of (1) different political agendas, (2) different cultural assumptions, (3) different historical methodology, and (4) different focuses of study” (3). Intertwined with the broader context in which historians operate are their individual approaches to the discipline based on personal and professional experiences. In short, point out Roger Spalding and Christopher Parker in Historiography: An Introduction, historians’ understandings of the past are “a product of contemporary society, which is in constant flux” (4). With its focus on how and why historical narratives change, historiography contributes significantly to broader discussions about what history is and why history is important.

Elaine B. Davis Research Award Winner Announced

Former DRT Library Director Elaine Davis presents a certificate to Award winner Debra Winegarten.

At this year’s Texas History Forum, the first Elaine B. Davis Research Award was presented to Ms. Debra L. Winegarten of Austin. Ms. Winegarten is the author of several books, including Katherine Stinson: The Flying School Girl and Strong Family Ties: The Tiny Hawkins Story. Her book Mum’s the Word is a tribute to her mother, Ruthe Winegarten, who was a noted Texas women’s historian and a researcher at the DRT Library. Ms. Winegarten will use DRT Library collections to write a book about Clara Driscoll for middle school students.  Ms. Winegarten pointed out the the seventh grade history curriculum in Texas includes biographies of famous Texans, twenty-two men and three women; she sees her work as helping introduce young adults to more women who have contributed to the history of the state.

The Elaine B. Davis Research Award, endowed by the 2007-2009 Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library Committee chaired by Connie Impelman and sponsored by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, is awarded to bring scholars to San Antonio, Texas, to work with the unique materials housed at the DRT Library. Mrs. Davis served as Director of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library from 1998-2008.

From left to right, Connie Impelman, DRT Library Committee Chairman; Madge Roberts, DRT President General; Debra Winegarten, Award winner; Elaine Davis, former DRT Library Director.

Recap of the Texas History Forum, “Rangers and Rogues”

From left to right, Leslie Stapleton, DRT Library director; Dr. Paul Spellman, speaker; Connie Impelman, DRT Library Committee Chairman; Dr. Stephen L. Hardin, speaker; Mike Cox, speaker.

This past Saturday, the DRT Library held its twenty-second Texas History Forum. Entitled “Rangers and Rogues,” the program featured three speakers who explored Texans who enforced the law and those who broke it.

Mike Cox speaking about the history of the Texas Rangers.

Mike Cox, an author and former spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, got things underway by presenting ten arguments about the history of the Texas Rangers, taken in part from his most recent book, The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 (2008). For example, Mr. Cox noted that “in something of an irony, since Rangers sometimes were pitted against Mexicans, part of their tradition traces to Spanish Colonial law enforcement in Texas” (14). He also asserted that, even though “men riding in the name of frontier protection or law and order” killed some innocent people, some historians’ portrayal of Rangers as “racist practitioners of genocide, gun-toting tools of a greedy, land-grabbing Anglo establishment…is not accurate and certainly not fair” (15). Forum attendees also enjoyed Mr. Cox’s stories about his grandfather, a Fort Worth newspaper man who encountered interesting characters throughout his career. Among these were some famous old-time Texas Rangers:  John R. Hughes, for example, enjoyed many a Sunday supper at the home of Mr. Cox’s grandparents.

Dr. Paul Spellman reading an oral history from his book, Spindletop Boom Days.

Dr. Paul Spellman, a professor of history at Wharton County Junior College, focused on his work Spindletop Boom Days (2001), which contains reminiscences of east Texas oil pioneers. Collected in the 1950s to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1901 discovery of the Spindletop oilfield, these oral histories document the development of the state’s oil industry from the turn of the century to 1950. (The written manuscripts now form the Texas Pioneers of Oil Collection, the Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.) Dr. Spellman read some of the accounts included in the book, specifically stories of mayhem and lawlessness as well as stories of rangers trying to impose law and order. For example, Dr. Spellman quoted Plummer Barfield, who recalled that he would “go out in the event of an accident and haul the wounded, the crippled or the dead to the livery stable – it became an undertaker’s parlor in those days.” One wintry night, a group of men stopped Barfield as he was bringing a body to the livery and ordered him to pick up the bodies of a woman, her baby, and two men. Eventually, Barfield “found out what happened”:

The woman and the baby had been sick and were in the tent, and some rattlebrained drunks had seen the lamp in the tent and had shot at it. They killed the woman and her baby, shot right through the baby’s head and the woman’s breast. Then the roughnecks and the rigrunners nearby caught the two drunks and hung ’em from a sweet gum tree!…Five bodies. One night.

Dr. Stephen L. Hardin regaling the audience with the less than pleasant elements of life in early Houston.

Finally, Dr. Stephen L. Hardin, a professor of history at The Victoria College in Victoria, Texas, gave the final presentation of the day, focusing on his recent work Texian Macabre: The Melancholy Tale of a Hanging in Early Houston (2007). The book tells the story of David James Jones, a hero of the Texas Revolution who, along with John Christopher Columbus Quick, was hung for killing a man. They were among a group of young American men who had volunteered for the Texian army and had been indefinitely furloughed by President Sam Houston. While some of these former soldiers returned to the United States, many went to Houston, at that time the capital of Texas, where they were unemployed, bored, and broke. Respectable Houston residents called these troublesome men “rowdy loafers.” Dr. Hardin urged attendees to remember these men, who, like their more well-known compatriots at the Alamo or Goliad, made sacrifices for Texas. Throughout his talk, Dr. Hardin entertained the audience with quotes from eyewitness accounts of Houston that – with their vivid descriptions of mud, mosquitoes, and rats – confirmed its reputation in the 1830s as “an unpleasant place” and “the most miserable place in the world.”

Thank you to all of our speakers, who presented fascinating information about the history of “Rangers and Rogues” in Texas!

22nd Texas History Forum on February 21

The DRT Library will be holding its 22^nd Texas History Forum on Saturday, February 21 in Alamo Hall on the Alamo Complex. The theme of this year’s Forum is “Rangers and Rogues.” The three special guest speakers for the day, Mike Cox, Dr. Paul Spellman, and Dr. Stephen Hardin, will recount the history of both sides of the law in 19th and early 20^th century Texas.

Seating is limited and pre-registration is advised. Registration is $20 per person. Reservations will remain open as long as seating is available.

Proceeds in excess of expenses will benefit the library’s operations endowment fund.

For more information on the Forum, including a schedule, registration form, and biographies of the special guest speakers, click here or call (210) 225-1071. We hope to see you there!