Southwestern Collection

Annual Meeting

Despite a norther that brought cold and wet weather over most of Texas, we were delighted that many familiar and new faces joined us at the 119th annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association at the Omni Corpus Christi Hotel in (where else?) Corpus Christi. Whether you made it to the meeting or not, we hope you will find the following news from the meeting useful. As usual, several awards and fellowships were presented at this year’s annual meeting and we had a few changes to our Board of Directors.

To honor the best article to appear in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly in 2014, the H. Bailey Carroll Award was bestowed on Catharine R. Franklin for “‘If the Government Will Only . . . Fulfill Its Obligations’: Colonel Benjamin Grierson, Rations Policy, and the Kiowa Indians, 1868– 1872,” which appeared in the October 2014 volume of the Quarterly.

Four books awards were presented this year. The Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for the best book on Texas published in 2014 went to Robert Wuthnow for Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State, published by Princeton University Press. Lawrence T. Jones won the Kate Broocks Bates Award, which honors a piece of historical research concerning Texas before 1900, for Lens on the Texas Frontier, published by Texas A&M University Press. The Ron Tyler Award for Best Illustrated Book on Texas History and Culture, an award funded by the Summerlee Foundation, was given for a book dealing with Texas history and using special visual applications such as photography and reproduction of historic paintings. This award also went to Lawrence T. Jones for Lens on the Texas Frontier. The newest TSHA award, the Al Lowman Memorial Prize, instituted last year to honor the longtime contributions of TSHA Fellow, Al Lowman, honored the best book on Texas county and local history. The winner was Harold Rich for Fort Worth: Outpost, Cowtown, Boomtown, published by University of Oklahoma Press.

TSHA Chief Historian Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell also announced the winners of five research fellowships. The first, the Catarino and Evangelina Hernández Research Fellowship in Latino History, is awarded annually for the best research proposal relating to the history of Latinos in Texas. This year’s fellowship went to Arturo Desantiago for his research project “Latinos in the Texas Legislature: A Brief History of their Achievements from the 1980s to Modern Times.” The Mary M. Hughes Fellowship in Texas History for the best research proposal on twentieth-century Texas history was awarded to Sarah Stanford-McIntyre for her project, “Working Landscapes: The Labor of West Texas Oil, 1920–1970.” Jessica Brannon-Wranosky earned the John H. Jenkins Research Fellowship in Texas History for the best research proposal having to do with Texas history for “Southern Promise and Necessity: Texas Regional Identity, and the National Woman Suffrage Movement, 1868–1920.” The Cecilia Steinfeldt Fellowship for Research in the Arts and Material Culture is awarded for the best research proposal on decorative and fine arts, material culture, preservation, and architecture in Texas from the seventeenth century to the present. This year, the fellowship went to Craig Bunch for “Interviews with Texas Artists.” The Lawrence T. Jones III Research Fellowship in Civil War Texas History was awarded to Evan Rothera for “The Postbellum Career of Filibustering: The Cases of Philip H. Sheridan and John T. Pickett.”

In a category by itself, the Mary Jon and J. P. Bryan Leadership in Education Award, given to recognize and honor the outstanding history teacher in Texas at the middle school, high school, and college levels, was presented by the award’s funder, J. P. Bryan. With the largest monetary prize of the TSHA awards, $5,000, the Bryan Award was presented to Jessica Janota of Rockport-Fulton Middle School in Aransas County.

Two new members were appointed to the TSHA Board of Directors, and there were several changes in position on the Board. Lynn Denton became president, and the previous holder of that position, John L. Nau III, remains on the Board as a past president. John Miller Morris...