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  • This Corner of Canaan: Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell ed. by Richard B. McCaslin, Donald E. Chipman, Andrew J. Torget
  • Diana Davids Hinton
This Corner of Canaan: Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell. Edited by Richard B. McCaslin, Donald E. Chipman, and Andrew J. Torget. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013. Pp. 452. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.)

Without doubt, Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell is one of the foremost Texas history scholars, so this collection of essays in his honor by his friends and former students is indeed welcome. As the editors note, these essays reflect Campbell’s profound influence on Texas historical scholarship, especially regarding two dominant aspects of his scholarly approach: his emphasis on Texas’s southern identity and his focus on grassroots research in local records to test prevailing generalizations and excise distortions created by popular memory. The editors organize sixteen essays into sections on Texas identity, the pre-Civil War era, Civil War and Reconstruction, Texas and the New South, and twentieth-century Texas.

Is Texas southern, western, or exceptional—simply unique? Walter Buenger agrees with Campbell that between 1845 and 1890 Texas fit the southern model, but after 1890 he sees that identity shifting to “first western and then American” (9), concluding, “More often than not, Texas was American and universal” (3). Light Cummins emphatically agrees with Campbell regarding Texas’s essentially southern identity, but argues that popular memory created a western identity, a transformation he sees happening in the 1930s.

Essays relating to pre-Civil War Texas focus on three significant individuals in early Texas history. Donald Chipman introduces us to all but forgotten Fray José Antonio Pichardo, who literally worked himself to death writing a three-thousand [End Page 78] page report defending Spain’s claims regarding the Texas-Louisiana boundary. Carol Lipscomb describes how Sam Houston’s service as an Indian agent influenced his later career, while Andrew Torget argues for Stephen F. Austin’s wholehearted commitment to the institution of slavery.

The essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction offer perspectives on key questions. Carl Moneyhon, for example, studies the extent to which the war meant changes in the landholding elite of Brazos County. Andrew Lang contrasts the behavior of bored and unruly Confederate soldiers on the Gulf Coast to ideals of Confederate nationalism, while Bradley Clampitt looks at how some North Texas Confederates obtained amnesty once the shooting stopped. By examining an ugly instance of racial violence in Reconstruction Hill County, Richard McCaslin demonstrates the fallibility of popular memory, in which the perpetrators were turned into heroes. In each instance, research at the grassroots level sets aside facile generalizations.

Essays on Texas and the New South include Gregg Cantrell’s analysis of political currents in Milam County to show how Conservative Democrats, Populists, and Progressives vied for political power in the 1890s. Mark Stanley shows how the poll tax disfranchised blacks and poor whites in Cooke County, and Gregory W. Ball identifies how draft boards made exemptions in Denton County during World War I. Turning to urban development, Alwyn Barr uses Little Rock, Shreveport, Houston, and San Antonio to illuminate the black urban experience with respect to neighborhood segregation and public health. Urban emphasis also dominates the final group of essays, with Jessica Brannon-Wranosky’s study of the Woman’s Monday Club in Corpus Christi; Harriet Joseph, Alix Riviere, and Jordan Renner’s biographical perspective on Corpus Christi educators Edmundo and Jovita González Mireles; and Wesley Phelps’s description of grassroots activism in the Houston War on Poverty of the 1960s. What these essays have in common is their focus on how local experience sheds light on broader changes.

Reflecting Campbell’s interests and methods, this collection, stimulating as it is, does not attempt to represent all aspects of Texas history. Texas west of Fort Worth, for example, receives no attention, and important parts of the twentieth-century experience like demographic change, industrial growth, petroleum development, and federal military spending are conspicuously absent. That said, the essays do address an important range of topics in Texas history. Even better, the collection showcases not only the work of established scholars...

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