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Beyond Parochialism Modernization and Texas Historiography nancy Beck young The Oxford English Dictionary defines parochialism as a “Parochial character or tendency; esp. confinement of one’s interests to the local sphere; lack of global perspective; narrowness of view; petty provincialism.” similarly, it defines modernization as “The action or an act of modernizing something; the state of being modernized. also: a modernized version.”1 scholars of Texas history have in the past been charged with parochialism for exploring isolated topics not relevant to the larger narrative of the United states and its role in the world, but that criticism is inaccurate for the writings of the last twenty or so years. instead, many historians have argued about three things, including when modernization began, the processes by which Texas became modern, and how and why Texas became more integrated into the world beyond its borders. Just what has changed in the last two decades since the creation and publication of the essays in Texas Through Time (1991)?2 Just as the borders between Texas scholarship and national scholarship have diminished, so too has the border between what is local and what is national in Texas history. Historians now focus on the connections between Texas and beyond. Texas historians now often lead the field rather than trailing it. This has resulted in large part because Texas historians interested in the various aspects of modernization have moved beyond the paradigm described in Texas Through Time, which pitted heroic revisionists against defenders of a traditional, celebratory literature, and have begun asking new questions. Thus, whereas the national profession motivated historians twenty years ago, that is less true in the early twenty-first century. The foci of scholarly inquiry have enlarged in the last two decades, when the new social History and race and class were the dominant trends. in the years since, scholars have engaged wholly new modes of analysis, including gender, modernization, the new political history, and cultural history. Because so many H nancy beck young 222 historians working on modernization questions in Texas history have crossed these boundaries with the work on larger regions of the United states and the nation as a whole, a richer and more nuanced history of Texas has emerged. Texas historians have in the last two decades been asking questions that merge the Lone star state’s story with the regional or national or international story. This trend toward seeing Texans and Texas history as part of something larger and in some cases as architects of national and international currents characterizes much of the recent work on Lone star state topics and is most apparent in scholarship in the borderlands and the study of national politicians from Texas. embedded within this work is the theme of modernization, which encompasses many different fields and is reflected in the arguments of much of the literature written about recent Texas topics. The two main trends then, in the historiography have been the effort to situate Texas history within american history and to assert when and how Texas became modern. Put simply, since 1988 Texas history has changed from being too parochial to being focused on crossing borders between the state and the nation. as recent scholars have debated modernization processes they have merged the study of Texas with larger national historical trends. There is a double way of looking at this development: while the scholarship of the last two decades is far less parochial and far more integrated into the mainstream of U.s. history, a most desirable development, it is also less uniquely interested in the Texas experience as an end point. Much of the recent literature has a larger thematic purpose beyond explicating and celebrating things Texan. instead, work on Texas modernization , regardless of topic, focuses on the move of Texas and Texans into national politics, economics, culture, and society. Histories of Texas now more closely follow national trends, indeed in the case of at least Mexican american civil rights, they lead national trends. The fit though, of Texas history with U.s. history remains somewhat askew, but this is not necessarily a problem. Just as Texans stood within and outside the circle of the larger United states, writings on Texas history are increasingly mirroring this fact, existing both within but also outside, even ahead of, the circle of the larger historical profession. When Texas Through Time was first published, Walter L. Buenger and robert a. Calvert contended that the scholarship on modern Texas was so underdeveloped that work...

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