Southwestern Collection

The Texas State Historical Association will hold its 121st Annual Meeting, March 2–4, 2017, in Houston, and the program committee is now calling for proposals for sessions and papers to be presented at the meeting. We are accepting proposals for full sessions and individual papers. Proposal worksheets can be downloaded at https://tshasecurepay.com/annual-meeting/2017_program_worksheet.pdf.

A complete session proposal includes the following: session title; complete name, address, phone number, a one-page vita, and institutional affiliation (or hometown, in the case of lay historians) of the session chairman, paper presenters (either two or three), and commentator (for sessions with two paper presenters); titles of the two or three individual papers; and a brief summary of each paper. Each complete session is strictly limited to seventy-five minutes. To allow time for introductions and questions, each presentation in three-paper sessions should not exceed twenty minutes (about ten typewritten pages). and in two-paper sessions each should be limited to twenty-five minutes (about twelve pages). As much as possible, participants in a given session should be from different institutions. Historians from outside Texas, but doing work in Texas-related studies, are encouraged to participate.

Individuals may submit a proposal for a single paper rather than a complete session. Although single papers are often difficult to combine into coherent sessions, committee members will make every effort to include such proposals in the program.

Papers presented should not have been delivered at a scholarly meeting or published prior to the 2017 Texas State Historical Association meeting. There are, of course, no objections to the papers being given again or published after the meeting. Individuals who participate in the TSHA’s annual programs may present a paper once every three years or serve as a commentator once every two years. Session chairs may repeat annually, although the committee will make every effort to avoid repetition. Individuals who are to present papers at the 2017 meeting will be required to have a copy of their paper and a one-page vita in the hands of their session chairman and session commentator (in two-paper sessions) at least a month prior to the meeting.

Proposals should be submitted to: Texas State Historical Association, Annual Meeting Proposals, 3001 Lake Austin Blvd., Austin, TX 78703 or electronically to Charles.Nugent@TSHAonline.org. Proposals for the 2017 Annual Meeting must be received by February 1, 2016. Any questions may be directed to Randolph “Mike” Campbell, Chief Historian of the TSHA, at (940) 565-3402 or mike@unt.edu.

Michael P. Malone Award

The editors of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly are pleased to announce that Andrew C. Baker’s article “From Rural South to Metropolitan Sunbelt: Creating a Cowboy Identity in the Shadow of Houston,” which appeared in July 2014 issue of the Quarterly, has won the Western History Association’s biennial Michael P. Malone Award, for the best article, essay, or commentary on state, provincial, or territorial history in North America appearing in a periodical publication. The award was dispersed at the WHA’s October 2015 annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, and this marks the third time a Quarterly article has won the award since 2001, the others being Gregg Cantrell’s “The Bones of Stephen F. Austin: History and Memory in Progressive-Era Texas” (2005) and Walter Buenger’s “Texas and the South” (2001). The article was published when Baker was finishing his Ph.D. at Rice University; he is now an assistant professor at Texas A&M University–Commerce.

In Memoriam

William C. Foster, the author and editor of numerous books on Texas history, died on September 3, 2015, in Cuero, Texas, at the age of eighty-six. He was a graduate of Southwestern University and the University of Texas Law School. After a long career in Washington, D.C., he returned home to Texas in the mid-1990s and began a second career as a historian. Among his many publications were The La Salle Expedition to Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel, 1684–1687 (1998) and The La Salle Expedition on the Mississippi River: A Lost...