SOUTHWESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY最新文献

• Southwestern Collection

The Texas State Historical Association will host its 128th Annual Meeting in College Station on February 28–March 2, 2024 at the Texas A&M Conference Center. Registration will open Fall 2023.

Held each year since the Association's founding, TSHA's Annual Meeting is the largest gathering of its kind for Texas history enthusiasts and professional and independent scholars. This event offers a range of opportunities for individuals and organizations working in historical, cultural, preservationist, and tourist services. In addition to 120 speakers and more than 30 panels, the conference includes eight banquets and receptions, multiple offsite tours, and additional special events that enable attendees to engage with our host city's unique history and culture. Visit https://am.tsha.events/ for more information. [End Page 340]

When Lawrence W. Minor arrived in the spring of 1878 at what would become Prairie View A&M University, he found the only structure for classrooms and offices to be the old main house of Alta Vista Plantation, known as Kirby Hall for the family who previously owned the property. Image Courtesy of Prairie View A&M University

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This issue marks another changing of the guard for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly (SWHQ) and the "Southwestern Collection." Ryan Schumacher stepped down after fifteen years as managing editor of the SWHQ and the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) Press. He provided invaluable support and service during a period of many changes in the TSHA, including a sojourn in Denton and the implementation of new bylaws that restructured TSHA publication processes. We wish him the best of luck in all his future endeavors.

TSHA

The TSHA will host its 128th Annual Meeting at College Station on February 28–March 2, 2024, at the Texas A&M University Conference Center. Held each year since the TSHA's founding, the Annual Meeting remains the largest of its kind for Texas history enthusiasts and professional and independent scholars. The event offers a range of opportunities for individuals and organizations working in historical, cultural, preservation, and tourist services. More than 700 people regularly attend and another 170,000 TSHA members and constituents are reached through email and social and traditional media about the event. In addition to speakers and panels, the Annual Meeting includes banquets and receptions, multiple offsite tours, and additional special events that enable attendees to engage with our host city's history and culture. Information about registration is at https://tsha.wildapricot.org/event-5312433.

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Reviewed by:

• Emmet J. Scott: Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine by Maceo C. Dailey Jr.
• Mark Stanley

Emmet J. Scott was born in Houston, Texas in 1873. He attended Wiley College in Marshall before leaving school to found a successful African American newspaper, the Texas Freeman. The connections he cultivated with African American business and political leaders around the state, along with his organizational skills, soon brought him notice from Norris Wright Cuney, the African American leader of the Texas Republican Party in 1894. Under Cuney's tutelage, Scott gained national political connections and valuable political acumen. As a political operative and a newspaper man, Scott was well acquainted with the work of Booker T. Washington. He had written several pieces in his Texas Freeman supportive of Washington's famous Atlanta Cotton Exposition speech in 1895. His skills and connections allowed Scott to be charged with the [End Page 354] responsibility of arranging Washington's trip to Texas in 1897. Scott's attentive performance was such that Washington offered him a position as his personal secretary. He held the position until Washington's death in 1915, and in the course amassed power and influence of his own under the "Tuskegee Machine."

The author notes that by 1902, "Emmet and Booker had a Tuskegee Machine that guaranteed them significant political power and influence." (p. 87) The two travelled around the country on speaking engagements, with Scott introducing Washington in generous terms that praised his ideas concerning race relations. The two worked hard to cultivate access for African Americans to the inner workings of the Republican Party at both the state and national levels. Securing patronage jobs to the friends of Tuskegee Institute as well as other African Americans, and their ability to influence racial policies, were particularly useful. Ultimately, Washington's and Scott's work with Tuskegee made "realistic and concrete gains… in changing the economic and educational status of Blacks." (p. 214) Furthermore, without their work between 1905 and 1915, "advancement that would most likely have been postponed or may not have taken place at all" was brought forward. (p. 215) Scott's contribution to that process is significant and bears the attention of future scholars.

This book is, in a sense, the life work of Maceo Dailey, originating as a doctoral dissertation in 1983 that he never published in his lifetime. Will Guzmán and David Jackson have done an excellent job of

Reviewed by:

• Borders of Violence and Justice: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Law Enforcement in the Southwest, 1835–1935 by Brian D. Behnken
• Tim Bowman

Brian Behnken's Borders of Violence and Justice is an examination of ethnic Mexicans' relationships to "formal and informal law enforcement"—municipal and state police forces, mobs, and the U.S. federal government—from 1835 to 1935. (p. 2) Most importantly, Behnken emphasizes ethnic Mexican people's historical agency to show how resistance and advocacy existed in multiple, and sometimes unexpected, ways.

Behnken begins by surveying ethnic Mexicans' relationships with law enforcement around the time of the U.S. conquest of the Southwest in the 1840s. Informal citizens patrols dominated nonwhites in various Southwestern cities; some lynch mobs, like in the cities of Houston, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles, actually became municipal police forces over time. Behnken also shows how ethnic Mexicans resisted the formalization of law enforcement and governmental authority through mechanisms like the Kearny Code in New Mexico and Stockton proclamation in California, thus exposing the myth of locals' cooperation with the U.S. military during the tense years of the U.S.-Mexico War. In Chapter Two, Behnken analyzes the relatively well-trod ground of nineteenth century vigilantism. Interestingly, Behnken uses stories such as that of Ramon Cordova, who was hanged by a Maricopa County lynch mob after his arrest and found guilty posthumously by a coroner's court, to dispel the myth of a failed U.S. justice system in the Southwest. The next chapter narrates the fascinating stories of Mexican and Mexican-American law enforcement officials in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that their collective service "demonstrates one of the ways Mexican-origin people fought for law and order" despite their general dispossession in the decades following 1848. (p. 96) Ethnic Mexican law enforcement is perhaps particularly noteworthy given the justice system's propensity to ascribe an innate criminality to people of Mexican descent, and for the public's propensity to see "bandits everywhere" across the borderlands, the latter an especially acute problem in the early twentieth century Texas borderland. (p. 147) Finally, Behnken convincingly demonstrates in Chapter Six that pressures to reform policing—perhaps most prominently in the wake of Representative J. T. Canales's famous legislative investigations of the Texas Rangers in 1919—helped modernize p

• A Family of Five Generations of Texas Physicians
• Carlos R. Hamilton Jr., MD, FACP, MACE (bio)

W L. and Algie Denman

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The original motivation for this manuscript came in response to the interest expressed by my friends and peers when they learned that our son, Carlos Hamilton III, represented the fifth generation of physicians in our family. I believed that it was a story worth telling, but if this story was to be recorded, I knew I would need to pick up my pen and begin writing. I am fortunate to have vivid childhood memories after spending nearly two years living with my grandparents, Peyton R. Denman and Frances Wootters Denman, when my father, Carlos R. Hamilton Sr., served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Many of my remembrances of listening to my grandparents would be lost for posterity unless recorded while my memory is intact. Many of these recollections have been verified and clarified in preparing this text. This is especially true of the life of the first physician in my family line, Alexander Madison "Dr. Matt" Denman, who died more than three decades before my birth but played a critical part in this story.

The profound changes that mark the 150-year span of these generations are worthy of documentation, as those living in the present time could hardly imagine the evolution of health care. When Dr. Matt was born in 1858, the use of general anesthesia for operative procedures was only just becoming available and management and prevention of postoperative infection was still on the horizon. He created, in the 1880s, the first hospital, in which surgical services could be provided, in his home county of Angelina in East Texas. The advances that made a hospital essential [End Page 289] paved the way for the next two generations of surgeons to participate in developing techniques that completely revolutionized the profession.

Our story will refer to major advances, some of which have been recognized by the Nobel Prize in Medicine, although all had profound effects on health care around the world. Each of our generations has experienced paradigm-changing developments: safer blood transfusion; effective antiseptic techniques; radio isotopic assays that greatly advanced the accuracy of diagnoses; effective antibacterial therapy, beginning with sulfanilamide and penicillin, which improved the outlooks for patients in ways that were never before possible; accurate, non-invasive diagnostic techniques; ongoing developments in surgical procedures; and the use of less invasive treatments with superior results are among many examples. Although technology and scientific advances completely changed the practice of medicine, the hu

Reviewed by:

• King Fisher: The Short Life and Elusive Legend of a Texas Desperado by Chuck Parsons and Thomas C. Bicknell
• William C. Yancey

John King Fisher has not generally been as celebrated and studied as other outlaws of his era such as Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, or Jesse James. Yet during the mid to late 1870s, Fisher was one of the most feared men in South Texas, holding sway over several counties along the border with Mexico. Similarly, as a desperado-turned-lawman, he is usually not mentioned in the same company as Pat Garrett or Wyatt Earp. However, as a deputy sheriff of Uvalde County during the early 1880s, he was well-regarded and would probably have been overwhelmingly elected sheriff of that county in November1884 had he not been killed in March of that year. Chuck Parsons' and Thomas Bicknell's biography of Fisher is therefore a welcome and useful addition to the body of knowledge about social conditions during a volatile era in Texas History.

This biography follows Fisher from his birth in Collin County to his upbringing in Goliad County, to his young adulthood and criminal [End Page 353] activities in Dimmit and Maverick Counties, ending with his career as a lawman in Uvalde County. The picture that emerges is of a young man trying to survive in a harsh and violent environment who often resorted to crimes like cattle theft and murder. He was so feared during the late 1870s that it was difficult to find jurors to try him or witnesses to testify against him. Fisher apparently decided to change his ways after being arrested by famed Ranger Captain Leander H. McNelly. By the early 1880s he had moved his family to Uvalde County, where he served as the deputy sheriff until his violent death on March 11, 1884. Unfortunately, Fisher was assassinated while attempting to make peace between his friend, Ben Thompson, and the owners of San Antonio's Vaudeville Theater.

The co-authors are prolific authors of crime and law enforcement in Reconstruction-era Texas, Parsons having previously written biographies of Texas Rangers McNelly, John B. Armstrong, and Lee Hall. Parsons and Bicknell also collaborated on a biography of Ben Thompson, the gambler and Austin city marshal who was murdered with Fisher in San Antonio. This biography of Fisher is the result of the same exhaustive research readers have come to expect from the authors. In this case, documenting Fisher's life was made particularly difficult by the lack of primary source material. Unlike Billy the Kid or Hardin, Fisher apparently di

• Not an Outraged Generation:White Student Liberals and Limited Integration at the University of Texas at Austin, 1946–1960
• John A. Moretta (bio)

Representatives from University of Texas student organizations listen to an unidentified man speak on the Marion Heman Sweatt case in November 1946. ND-46-262-01, Neel Douglass Photography Collection, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

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In early 1944, Regent Orville Bullington defiantly declared that "there is not the slightest danger of any negro attending the University of Texas, regardless of what Franklin D, Eleanor, or the Supreme Court says, so long as you have a Board of Regents with as much intestinal fortitude as the present one."¹ At the same time that Bullington expressed such certainty to a colleague, some University of Texas (UT) students in Austin were expressing the opposite view, and they were just as unequivocal as Bullington in their belief that it was time for the university to live up to its mantra of being "a university of the first class" by opening its doors to all students on an equal basis, regardless of the color of their skin. As Daily Texan editor Bob Owens declared in 1943, "If we are to win the peace, we must first erase all traces of fascism in this country. Our prejudices, our hatreds, our fascistic idea of racial superiority, must be forgotten if we are to build out of this war a nation 'of the people, by the [End Page 243] people, and for the people.' Freedom and democracy should be for all, regardless of race, color, or creed."²

Owens's powerful words were a preview of the postwar years on the Forty Acres, as was Bullington's intransigence. As the United States defeated fascism in Europe, some UT students continued the fight against racism at home. According to the Daily Texan, it was time "for the South's largest university to become an example, a leader, in the cause for Negro equality. The success or failure of the University in this matter can raise to the highest pinnacles or plunge to the lowest depth the hopes and aspirations of the entire Negro population of the United States." As one student declared in 1946, "I advocate opening the doors of every school and college of the University to any person, be he black, or white or bright purple," and in 1948 the Daily Texan "put [its] position very plainly: Equality for the Negro Race Cannot be Deferred Forever … The printed text of our Constitution rings out against discrimination, and yet it is far from reality… the Negro should be granted full equality, or the Constitution amended. W

Reviewed by:

• Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images by Ron Tyler
• Michael Grauer

To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, ever so slightly, regarding Texas:

"Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wraths of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing … Texas [is] yet unsung. Yet [Texas] is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imaginations."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet," 1844

After nearly 40 years of working on this massive project, Ron Tyler has provided a careful, thoughtful, and sensitive examination of Texas as seen by outside observers who 'learned' about Texas through popular imagery; and almost exclusively from lithographs.

While most believe they learned truths of the American West, and certain locales in particular such as Texas, via the printed word, images accompanied those "truths" to further solidify beliefs about Texas in popular thought. Initially wood engravings, a painstaking yet fairly inexpensive method for disseminating the sketches of an artist in the field through mass reproduction, these images then found a more nuanced medium in lithography, as Tyler clearly demonstrates. He captures the allure to the artist of the lithographic medium in his penetrating analysis of the evolution of Texas imagery through depictions of myths, landscape, city views, Confederacy, and—especially fascinating--"The Image Breakers."

Having lived on the Llano Estacado for 31 years and wandered all over West Texas, this reviewer especially appreciated Tyler's circumspection in [End Page 352] relaying the exaggerations found in the reports of Randolph B. Marcy, Amiel W. Whipple, and William H. Emory. The "mid-nineteenth-century explorers' groping for perspective" relied upon their only artistic frame of reference--Picturesque and Romantic--for the fantastical scenes they encountered, including the exoticism of Native Americans. Tyler's chapter "Pretty Pictures … 'Candy' for the Immigrants" also strikes close to home. My German ancestors immigrated to Illinois from southwestern Germany in the 1870s, then to Kansas and Texas, likely drawn by lithographs espousing the rich lands there such as Panorama der Stadt Neu-Braunfels in Texas …, as discussed by Tyler.

Tyler's chapter "The Image Breakers" is especially effective when he dissects the myriad images of "cowboys" circulated via popular lithographs. While Tyler may not be entirely correct in some of his

• How Alta Vista Became Prairie View:Lawrence Washburne Minor and the Beginnings of Public Higher Education for African Americans in Texas
• John A. Adams Jr. (bio)

Lawrence W. Minor. Courtesy of Prairie View University Archives.

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Lawrence Washburne Minor was, in many ways, a quintessential Black Texas leader of the late nineteenth century. Born into slavery in the South and educated in the North, he returned to his roots to serve and lead his people. Minor's contributions have been overlooked, perhaps because they were both varied and geographically diverse. His experiences laid a solid foundation for his later career as an educator. Minor followed a varied path to becoming one of the first faculty at Alcorn University, having worked as an abolitionist, merchant, schoolteacher, riverboat porter, and administrator of the Freedmen's Bank. When conditions at Alcorn proved untenable, Minor served in the Mississippi state government before opportunity brought him to Texas. Minor's experience, adaptability, and proven intelligence made him a crucial figure in the history of Texas higher education. He set the foundation of the state's first African American institution of public higher education and saved the fledgling institution from an early demise. The story of Black leadership in the trans-Mississippi West following Reconstruction has not been fully explored, and Minor's contributions and career have gone unnoticed. As of this writing, the Handbook of Texas does not include an entry for him. His foundational leadership at what would become known as Prairie View A&M University ultimately resulted in the [End Page 269] institution having the largest enrollment of any Black public institution of higher learning in the nation by the turn of the twentieth century.

Lawrence Minor was born in 1830 into slavery on Linwood Plantation, in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, some seventy miles upriver from New Orleans. Ascension Parish, located along a bend in the Mississippi River was a prime sugar production region where more than two hundred enslaved people labored on the 2,000-acre plantation. Lawrence's father, Philip Minor, was among the leading White plantation owners in the region, and so was his grandfather. Philip's father, William, an absentee owner of numerous plantations south of Baton Rouge, directed the management of his Louisiana plantations from his home in Natchez, Mississippi. Lawrence, his mother, and siblings lived and worked in the main house, and the children received their early education from the Minor family tutors.¹

A bachelor until his death in about

Reviewed by:

• That They May Possess the Land: The Spanish and Mexican Land Commissioners of Texas, 1720–1836 by Galen D. Greaser
• James A. Bernsen

Galen D. Greaser's work takes up an enormous task: to document the story of how Texas land was granted to private individuals in the Spanish and Mexican eras of Texas history. This is not as arcane a topic as it might at first appear: land was the greatest motivating force in early Texas history. Both in the Spanish and Mexican periods, security and economic development mandated settlement, and settlement mandated land ownership. Land ownership in turn required commissioners empowered to transfer land to individuals in an approved, legal process. Without the ability to own land with clear title, settlement in Texas would have been difficult, if not impossible. As the long-serving curator and translator of the Spanish collection of the General Land Office, Greaser is uniquely qualified to tell this story, and this work's contribution to the understanding of early Texas history will be profound. The work is also well documented, and the use of extensive footnotes allows the narrative to remain clean and readable—a must for a subject that would otherwise be dry.

This book well outlines the complex role of the early land commissioners in Texas. The position was not limited to a single individual, operating among well-defined rules, but rather a myriad of officials at multiple levels, often at odds with each other and employing different interpretations of laws. The Mexican approach in particular, Greaser notes, was disorganized, discordant, and fractured. Policy was implemented both at the state and national levels, leading to confusion and conflict.

Greaser's work thoroughly outlines the evolution of the approval process for land titles from the simple work of the Baron de Bastrop approving titles for Stephen F. Austin's Old 300 to a more Byzantine structure of multiple commissioners approaching this difficult task, coincident with the evolving scramble for Texas land in the late 1820s. There were general commissioners, focused on the larger plans for Texas, special commissioners attached to individual empresarios or grants, and even local commissioners such as alcaldes empowered to grant lands within their jurisdiction. Furthermore, the Mexican nation in its early [End Page 351] days lacked certitude on who controlled public lands, the state or national governments. This led to competing commissioners, creating another venue for the emerging contest between federalist and centralist camps, culminating in Texas with struggl

Reviewed by:

• The Architecture of Birdsall P. Briscoe by Stephen Fox
• Kathryn E. Holliday

While for historians of Texas the last name "Briscoe" is instantly recognizable, Birdsall P. Briscoe is certainly not a well-known figure. Great-grandson of John Richardson Harris, namesake of Houston's Harris County, and grandson of Andrew Briscoe, officer in the Texas war of independence, Birdsall Briscoe eschewed the politics and military roles of his more famous forbears and became an architect who practiced in Houston for 50 years, between 1912 and 1962. His family's intimate, multigenerational connections with Houston's elite provided an instant clientele for Briscoe's elegant, stately city and country houses that continue to define the look and feel of luxury in the city today. Briscoe's designs for River Oaks, for Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend, for the Kappa Kappa Gamma House at the University of Texas at Austin, for ranch houses in East Texas, and dozens of other private commissions, represent the pinnacle of stylish good taste in Texas domestic architecture in the first half of the 20th century.

Stephen Fox's painstakingly researched and beautiful new monograph argues that Birdsall Briscoe's designs for these luxurious houses should be understood as integral to the larger social and political history of Houston and Texas, evidence of the ways that Houston's elite used their social and financial capital to create tasteful neighborhoods and domestic settings that reflected their sense of appropriate urban order. Briscoe's designs, Fox writes, "enabled their owners to be identified as patrician leaders as well as the symbolic capital that constructed collective landscapes of power that nonelite Houstonians experienced as authoritative and beautiful rather than exclusionary and oppressive." (p. 12) Fox draws on the cultural theory of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to provide the foundations for this analytical framework, which contextualizes Fox's painstaking examination of Briscoe's designs.

Fox has written extensively across his long career about architecture in Texas, especially in Houston, Galveston, and Brownsville, and this book shows the depth of his understanding of architecture as formal and visual, as well as reflective of complex social dynamics. The book is arranged both thematically and chronologically, and while its title emphasizes Birdsall Briscoe as a designer, the chapter titles show that the book is equally about Houston itself, from Chapter Three "Progressive Houston," to Chapter Seven, "The City That Never Knew th