Southwestern Collection

We would like to take a moment to remind our readers that the 2017 Annual Meeting will be held March 2–4, 2017, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Houston. More details can be found at https://tshase-curepay.com/annual-meeting/, which will be updated periodically before the event.

Houston, Texas. People crossing a downtown street, May 1943. Photo by John Vachon. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C

In Memoriam

Patrick (Pat) Butler III of San Antonio, a life member of the Texas State Historical Association who some readers of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly may recall from his many times in attendance at the TSHA’s Annual Meeting, died at his home on June 23, 2016. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1945, he was a graduate of the College of William and Mary and received a master’s degree from the Winterthur American Decorative Arts Program at the University of Delaware and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, where he was a student of Jack Greene. During his academic career, Butler held fellowships at Historic Deerfield, the Smithsonian Institution, the Newberry Library, and the Field Museum in Chicago.

Butler first came to Texas in 1975 to serve as curator of history at Texas Tech University and to teach in the museum studies program there. He was subsequently director of the Institute for Museums and Community Education at the University of North Texas, consulting curator for the Galveston Historical Foundation’s Samuel May Williams House, curator of the Harris County Heritage Society in Houston, and historian and later director of the Moody Mansion, a historic house in Galveston. He also served as a consultant for the PRD Group as they developed the permanent exhibit for the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum in Austin and as a member of the collections review committee for the Texas State Capitol. He moved back to Virginia in 1993, but in 2009 he returned to Texas, where he served on the board of the San Antonio Historical Society.

Butler was an innovator in the use of sound and light in the interpretation of historic houses and an expert on nineteenth-century American decorative arts and architecture, eighteenth-century Anglican theology, and Virginia laws concerning the placement of political campaign signs, a subject on which he served as an advisor to two Democratic candidates for the governorship of Virginia. He was the author of several articles on museum topics and thirty-five entries in The Encyclopedia of the American West. At the time of his death, he was working on a book manuscript about historic preservation in Texas.

By Nancy Baker Jones

Sherilyn Brandentstein, a staff writer for the Handbook of Texas revision project in the 1980s and ’90s, died June 6, 2016, in Indianapolis. Her research and writing for the Handbook revision focused on women, particularly African Americans. A paper she presented at the Women and Texas History conference in 1990 was later published as “Sepia Record as a Forum for Negotiating Women’s Roles” in Women and Texas History: Selected Essays, the first academic anthology about Texas women’s history, which TSHA published in 1993. As an associate editor for the revision, I recall that hiring Sherilyn was an unexpected challenge: I quickly realized that she was interviewing me as well as responding to my questions of her. She wanted to know whether the project was serious about integrating the Handbook and to know that the earnest effort she would devote to her assignments would be worth the effort. In working with her, I came to understand that Sherilyn’s negotiating for this job was emblematic of her life. She was a seeker, for learning, social justice, peace, and for a healing spiritual community. Given the choice, for example, she would readily decline employment that did not contribute to some greater good.

Born in Philadelphia and raised a Baptist, she went to college in Colorado and earned a master’s...