Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away from Past Interpretations (review)

For many of us who teach, write, and think about Texas history, no single book has proven more valuable than a volume of essays edited twenty years ago by Walter L. Buenger and the late Robert A. Calvert. Texas Through Time: Evolving Interpretations (1991) featured a cast of that generation’s best Texas historians writing critical, sometimes damning, essays on the past and present state of Texas historiography. With a balanced mix of chronological and topical chapters, tied together by a provocative introductory essay by the editors, it painted a picture of Texas historical writing that had been characterized by a century of hero-worship, mythologizing, and cultural chauvinism. When its essays were being written in the late 1980s, the “new social history” was no longer very new in the American historical profession, but it was not yet the mainstream in the Lone Star State. Texas social historians, many of whom contributed essays to the volume, were still fighting an uphill battle to debunk old myths and to include the stories of women, Indians, Tejanos, African Americans, and ordinary Texans in the grand narrative of the state’s history.

As a sequel to that book, Beyond Texas Through Time takes stock of the field two decades later. With only six chapters compared to the original’s twelve, the strictly chronological chapters have been dropped, leaving Buenger to write the lead essay on the overall current state of Texas historiography, Pekka Hämäläinen on Indian history, Keith J. Volanto on political, economic, and military history, Michael Phillips on race and gender, Carlos Kevin Blanton on diversity and “Historical Imagination,” and Nancy Beck Young on modernization. All are valuable contributions.

Historians who concentrate on a specific era will wish that the chronological chapters had remained, but perhaps the new organizational scheme reflects the disintegration of tradition that characterizes the profession as a whole in recent years. The result is more overlap and repetition than one might hope for. For example, a casual browser might wonder how Michael Phillips’s essay with the subtitle “Race, Gender, and the ‘Other Texans’” will differ from Carlos Blanton’s on “The Diversity of People, Place, and Historical Imagination.” And indeed, these two essays do cover much of the same ground (which occasionally brings them into interesting conflict with one another). To cite specific examples of repetition, Neil Foley’s The White Scourge is discussed in five of the six essays; individual books by Juliana Barr, Pekka Hämäläinen, and Judith MacArthur all appear in four different chapters. Of course, any editor who has ever commissioned a volume of essays knows the difficulty of predicting, much less directing, what any group of independent-minded scholars will write, and I would be surprised if the final product bears a very close resemblance to the outline the editors drew up when the project was conceived.

What unites the six essays is their conclusion that much has changed since 1991. Buenger’s nuanced introductory chapter deftly summarizes those changes: First, the old triumphalist Texas history is still alive and well, albeit stripped of its most blatantly racist and sexist trappings. Second, social history has gone mainstream and exists in fairly robust quality and quantity alongside the older forms. But the most striking development is the extent to which a “third truth” (Buenger’s term) has joined the first two—the rise of the what might be called the “new cultural studies,” a set of approaches influenced by the broader currents of recent postmodernist thought. All of the essays cite examples of how the best new works on Texas place the state in a broader regional, national, or even international context; how our understanding of Texas has benefited from comparisons with other places; and how it has become more theoretical and interdisciplinary. Above all, these essays demonstrate how we have moved away from chauvinistic...