Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away from Past Interpretations

Editors’ Introduction

xi Editors’ introduction Over the past twenty years the study of Texas history has taken paths little noted by either the general public or historians. This collection of essays assesses and summarizes recent scholarly work. The title, Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away from Past Interpretations, communicates that much new literature has appeared, some of it of a completely different type. The title also consciously recalls an earlier work: Texas Through Time: Evolving Interpretations (1991). That previous volume serves as a starting point for the essays that follow and also serves as a basis for comparison. in the last twenty years or so, scholars have interrogated Texas history using imaginative new approaches. They have engaged different audiences, including national ones. They have rejected traditionalism and offered a version of the Texas story that challenges exceptionalism . some have also contested the revisionism of the late twentieth century , providing alternative views that often stress the importance of culture and identity. The meaning of the word “Texan” has been amplified to incorporate diversity. significantly, historians today situate Texas history in a national context , thereby supplanting the old construct that isolated the state from outside currents. While skeptics would argue that much remains the same, amid that continuity new conversations have emerged about how best to comprehend the Texas historical legacy. These stimulating dialogues not only stress the importance of tying Texas to the nation, they also illustrate how work on the state could prompt new avenues of interpretations for all historians. in the end, then, the study of Texas history offers hope for moving beyond the old parochialism and past the tendency of those working outside of Texas to ignore the region. in contrast, Texas Through Time, written between 1988 and 1990, grew out of a sense of mission and frustration. The editors, Walter L. Buenger and robert a. Calvert, were committed to changing Texans’ perceptions of their state. For too long, they lamented, Texans had viewed their state’s past romantically, heroically, and in the end, inaccurately. This ethnocentric and gender-skewed version of Texas history, which they rendered as the “Texas myth,” posited the Texas chronicle to encapsulate epic events of white males, who from the 1820s through around the 1870s and 1880s, led the conquest of the wild frontier , tamed lawless lands, and pacified savage indians. after almost a century of studying and writing Texas history, Buenger and Calvert fretted, scholars had H editors' introduction xii made hardly a dent on this long-standing interpretation. in the face of almost a century that separated a bygone age that appeared incompatible with the more current trends of the late twentieth century, Texans needed to reassess the manner in which they remembered their state. Buenger and Calvert identified two camps then dominating Texas scholarship : the traditionalists (the keepers of tradition) and revisionists (those who called for overturning old-school interpretations). The former strove to preserve the historical heritage that had its roots in the frontier milieu. Traditionalists , on the one hand, stood fast in approaching Texas history, as had a long line of scholars since the late nineteenth century, thereby perpetuating the Texas myth. They wrote from a consensus mind-set that saw Texas history shaped by white sacrifice, anglo moxie, and american resourcefulness. Building on national trends beginning in the 1960s, revisionists, on the other hand, had finally offered a counterapproach to traditionalism. at the forefront of this surge was the new social History, the then popular research concept that privileged ordinary people in history, asserting that they influenced historical events as meaningfully as elites. But despite the promise of this approach, Buenger and Calvert warned that revisionists needed to pursue newer orientations and more creative lines of inquiry. should they fail to do so, they feared, the Texas myth would remain intact, ready to repel any assault upon it. no valid synthesis of Texas history existed as of the late 1980s, they noted, except the old one. Given such a condition , Texas scholarship still seemed parochial, very much in the periphery of the national literature and in urgent need of catching up. a last purpose, then, behind the publication of Texas Through Time was to encourage more innovative, imaginative, and insightful ways of thinking about Texas history. alerted to the deficiencies that plagued Texas historical writings (as indicated by the several essays that comprised the book), Buenger and Calvert hoped scholars would be stirred to abandon old staid topics that even engaged the revisionists. scholars would excitedly enter into fresh...