"From High on the Hilltop": Marshall Terry's History of SMU (review)

404Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJanuary "From High on tL· Hilltop": Marshall Terry's History ofSMU. By Marshall Terry et al. (Dallas: DeGolyer Library and Three Forks Press, 2008. Pp. 148. Illustrations. ISBN 9781893451 148, $24.95 paper.) Marshall Terry has been affiliated with Southern Methodist University as a faculty member and administrator for more than fifty years. During that time, as a professor of English, he has distinguished himself as a master teacher, a lucid essayist, and a widely read author ofwell over a dozen volumes of fiction and literary criticism. In 1993, he wrote a short, informal history of SMU (revised for a second edition in 2000) ; in so doing, he commented historically on the university becoming one of Texas's preeminent institutions of higher learning. Since that time, no historian or scholar has come forward to write a history of the school tiiat might expand and carry forward Terry's earlier study to the present-day. Now, anticipating the one-hundredth anniversary of SMU's founding in 201 1 and the centennial of its first classes in 2015, Professor Terry has updated his earlier history to die present. Importantly, he invited other members of the university community to contribute additional essays to the volume. These include, among others , Darwin Payne,James Early, Russell L. Martin III, Patricia Ann LaSaIIe, and R. Gerald Turner, the latter being the university's president. Each of diem has taken a topic with which they are familiar and developed it historically in an essay as an addendum that follows the chronological narrative written by Professor Terry. These essays, along widi the historical overview by Terry, provide snapshots of the school's growth with an emphasis on recent decades during which SMU has experienced a significant expansion of its campus facilities, an enhanced emphasis on graduate education, and a national recognition diat has in part resulted from its being designated as the anticipated home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. In particular, these essays make for interesting reading because they survey and explain much of what has occurred at SMU during a time of marked development. However, it should be noted that some of the essays seem at times a bit self-congratulatory and uncritical in tone, although they do make for very interesting reading. The topics of these essays include the development of the English Department, the DeGolyer Library, a history of prominent women affiliated with the university, student life, the athletic program, and a history of the Taos campus. The eight chapters of this book that contain Professor Terry's historical narrative constitute the heart of the volume. He traces die founding of the school in die first decade of the twentieth century and relates its creation to the turnof -the-century state of affairs at Southwestern University in Georgetown, another Methodist college that predated SMU and furnished some of its first faculty members and administrators. His assessment of the World War I years and the 1920s catalogs some ofdifficulties inherent in the founding ofan urban university while he provides colorful sketches for some of its early faculty personalities. The chapiters dealing with Umphrey Lee and Willis Tate, two important university presidents from the 1940s to the 1960s, highlight the positive impact that decisive, selfconfident presidents can have on the development of a university. In this regard, Terry also gives credit to influential faculty members, including John McGinnis, 2010Book Reviews405 Herbert Gambrell, Claude Albritton, Jerry Bywaters, and Lon Tinkle. Although he modesdy does not do so, Professor Terry might also have included himself as a significant factor that has created the modern academic program. Given the distinguished history of SMU, this reviewer supposes that an academic historian will eventually embrace the researching and writing ofa comprehensive history of die school. Until that occurs, this very readable and informal history will suffice. Austin CollegeLight Townsend Cummins Blacks in East Texas History. Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Archie P. McDonald. Foreword by Cary D. Wintz. (College Station: TexasA&M University Press, 2008. Pp. 2008. Notes, appendix, index. ISBN 9781603440417, $29.95 cloth.) A collection of articles published in the East Texas HistoricalJournal between 1976 and 2006, Blacks in East Texas History convincingly demonstrates that the journal...