Living History

Jimmie James, age 59, was raised by a single mother in Huntsville, Texas. His family's home near Boettcher's Mill had no plumbing or electricity. Yet, he and his siblings made the best of things. After attending Prairie View A&M, and working for ExxonMobil, James was free to pursue one of his true passions: golf. Last year, he toured the one hundred greatest golf courses in America. Join us for a conversation about his experience. And, read about James's golf game here: https://www.golfdigest.com/story/a-regular-golfers-quest-to-play-americas-100-greatest-courses-in-one-year.

In this episode, Dr. Wesley Phelps sits down for a conversation with Dr. Linda White to discuss how she became involved in Bridges to Life after the murder of her daughter.

In this episode, Dr. Jeff Littlejohn and Graduate Assistant Jami Horne sit down for a conversation with Dr. Richard Watkins about his experiences battling racial segregation and discrimination in Huntsville, Texas.

In this episode, Alexander Dodd, Heather Howsmon, and Andres Rendon interview Professor Mark Lentz about his new book, Murder in Merida, 1792, which appeared with the University of New Mexico Press in May 2018. For more information see: http://unmpress.com/books.php?ID=20000000008060.

In this episode, co-host Wesley Phelps and guest host Jannah Nerren speak with Sam Houston State University President Dana Hoyt about her experience as one of the few female university presidents in Texas.

Dr. Reginald K. Ellis is an Associate Professor of History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) in Tallahassee, Florida. His undergraduate and MA degrees in history come from Florida A&M, and he received the PhD in history from the University of Memphis in 2011. Dr. Ellis has written numerous articles on the African American struggle to achieve equal educational opportunities at the collegiate level. His new book, Between Washington and DuBois: The Racial Politics of James Edward Shepard, appeared with the University of Florida Press this fall.Our interview will focus on Prof. Ellis’s new book as well as his forthcoming article entitled, “Florida State Normal and Industrial School for Coloreds: Thomas DeSalle Tucker and His Radical Approach to Black Higher Education,” which will appear in The Seedtime, The Work, and The Harvest: New Perspectives on the Black Freedom Struggle in America (Florida University Press, 2018).

A native of Fort Worth, Texas, E.R. Bills is the author of The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas as well as Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror. Mr. Bills received a BA in journalism from Southwest Texas State University and does freelance historical, editorial and travel writing for publications around Texas.

Phillip Luke Sinitiere is an author and professor specializing in American religious studies and African American history. He attended Sam Houston State University and the University of Houston, where he earned a PhD in 2009. He has published numerous articles and books on topics ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Joel Olsteen. Sinitiere’s work focuses on the Civil Rights Movement going into the present day. He has taught at the 2nd Baptist School, Houston Baptist University, U of H, and SHSU. He is currently a professor at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston, Texas.

A native of Opelousas, Louisiana, Dr. Merline Pitre is a professor of History and former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Behavioral Sciences at Texas Southern University. Dr. Pitre began her career in the 1960s as a French professor at St. Augustine College in Raleigh, North Carolina. After several years teaching foreign language, she enrolled at Temple University to pursue a degree in History. She completed her PhD in 1976 and then took a job at Texas Southern University in Houston.Dr. Pitre has written several important works during her career. Her first monograph, Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares: The Black Leadership of Texas, 1868 to 1898 (1985) has shaped the study of Reconstruction in Texas for an entire generation of scholars. Pitre’s other major work, In Struggle against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900-1957, appeared in 1999, and resulted in Lula White’s addition to the state-wide social studies curriculum in Texas public schools.Pitre has received numerous awards for her contributions to historical study. She was named Scholar of the Year at Texas Southern University in 1987. The following year, she received the Outstanding Black Texan Award from the Texas Legislative Black Caucus. In more recent years, she served as the first African American president of the Texas State Historical Association in 2011 and received the Lorraine Williams Leadership Award from the Association of Black Women Historians in 2014.

Erik Gellman is Associate Professor of History and Director of African American Studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Gellman holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. His first book The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in the New Deal America coauthored with Jarod Roll, argued that Christianity became a driving force for the Southern workingmen’s political and economic advancement in the New Deal era. By examining the lives of two preachers and labor activists, Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, Gellman explained an unusual and innovative link between labor and religious history. In 2012, Gellman published Death Blow to Jim Crow, which examines the birth and development of the National Negro Congress and its role as a militant civil rights organization in the mid-twentieth century.Serena Barbieri is a graduate student in history at Sam Houston State University.

Dr. Peter B. Levy is a professor of history at York College in York, Pennsylvania. He was born and raised in northern California, where he attended the University of California, Berkeley, and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978. Dr. Levy went on to study at Columbia University in New York City, where he earned both his Master’s degree and his Ph.D. in 1980 and 1986 respectively. He currently lives in Towson, Maryland with his wife. Dr. Levy is a specialist in recent American history. He gives courses on Modern America, Women, Race, and Economic History. Dr. Levy’s publications include: Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland; the Encyclopedia of the Clinton Presidency; Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary on the Modern Civil Rights Movement; The Civil Rights Movement: Guides to Historic Events of the Twentieth Century; The New Left and Labor in the 1960s; and, America in the Sixties - Right, Left, and Center. Currently Dr. Levy is working on a study of natural disasters in America.Our interview will examine Dr. Levy’s forthcoming work, “Revisiting the Urban Revolts of the 1960s: York, Pennsylvania—A Case Study,” which will appear in The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest: New Perspectives on the Black Freedom Struggle (Florida University Press, 2018).

In this episode, Wesley Phelps interviews former Houston mayor Annise Parker about her life in politics.

Last Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Joyce E. Taylor and Jeffrey Bashir, two of the grandchildren of Samuel Walker Houston. Born around 1871, Samuel Walker Houston was the son of Joshua and Sylvester Houston, two former slaves who worked for General Sam Houston in Huntsville, Texas. During the 1880s and 90s, Samuel Walker Houston attended the nation's leading black schools, including Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C. At the turn of the century, he returned to Huntsville and founded a training school in the little community of Galilee. Houston's school was one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a well-rounded education that included courses in literature, music, construction, and agriculture. By the time Houston's school merged with the Huntsville Independent School District in 1930, it boasted a dozen teachers and more than 400 students. Based on his remarkable record of achievement, Houston was selected as principal for the new African American high school in Huntsville, which was later named in his honor.In April 1915, Samuel Walker Houston married Hope G. Harville, one of the teachers at his school. Ms. Harville was a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, the outstanding African American college run by Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama. On August 25, 1917, the Houston family welcomed their second child and first daughter, Helen Hope, into the world. She later attended Wiley College, Talladega College, and graduated from Virginia State University, before enrolling to work for the IRS and teaching as a substitute teacher in New York. She spent the bulk of her career as a supervisor in the Data Processing Department at IBM, but also worked in California for the Naval Supply Center. Joyce E. Taylor and Jeffrey Bashir are the children of Helen Hope Houston. They both grew up and lived their adult lives in California. Their story is fascinating because it ties the Samuel Walker Houston family to the developments of the post-World War II era, including the Black Power Movement, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers.

Mark W. Lentz is a historian of Latin America who specializes in colonial Mexico and Central America (with a focus on the Maya of Yucatan, Guatemala, and Belize), legal history, and the history of the Atlantic World. His current interests include the role of interpreters and translation in the conquest and colonization of Yucatan, interethnic relations in colonial and early independence Mexico and Guatemala, and grassroots resistance to royal reforms of colonial administration in eighteenth-century Latin America. He recently published articles on indigenous-African relations in eighteenth-century Guatemala and Belize and the role of Jesuits in translation, conversion, and pedagogy in colonial Yucatan. He recently served as program coordinator for the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies (2015). He received his Ph.D. from Tulane University.

Guest host Lyndsey Holloway Hernandez interviews José Raúl García Trejo about his work as a tour guide in Mexico.

In the hands of the state, music is a political tool. The Banda de Musica del Estado de Oaxaca (State Band of Oaxaca, BME), a civil organization nearly as old as the modern state of Oaxaca itself, offers unique insights into the history of a modern political state. In The Inevitable Bandstand, Charles V. Heath examines the BME's role as a part of popular political culture that the state of Oaxaca has deployed in an attempt to bring unity and order to its domain. The BME has always served multiple functions: it arose from musical groups that accompanied military forces as they trained and fought; today it performs at village patron saint days and at Mexico's patriotic celebrations, propagating religions both sacred and civic; it offers education in the ways of liberal democracy to its population, once largely illiterate; and finally, it provides respite from the burdens of life by performing at strictly diversionary functions such as serenades and Sunday matinees. In each of these government-sanctioned roles, the BME serves to unify, educate, and entertain the diverse and fragmented elements within the state of Oaxaca, thereby mirroring the historical trajectory of the state of Oaxaca and the nation of Mexico from the pre-Hispanic and Spanish colonial eras to the nascent Mexican republic, from a militarized and fractured young nation to a consolidated postrevolutionary socialist state, and from a predominantly Catholic entity to an ostensibly secular one.

In this podcast, host Jeffrey L. Littlejohn speaks with historian Zach Doleshal and student Jordan Martinek about their recent public history course, "Recovering New Harmony."To the immediate east of Huntsville, Texas, just north of Highway 190, lie the remains of Grant’s Colony, aka New Harmony. Named after George Washington Grant, an entrepreneur and landowner in Walker County, the settlement was a rare phenomenon in Reconstruction Era Texas. For it was an attempt by a white southerner of the planter class to implement the promise of racial integration and create a rationalized agricultural community. Entrenched cultural attitudes frustrated Grant’s attempt to recruit white laborers, however, as very few took him up on his offer of employment, housing, and education. Freed slaves, though, came to the settlement in significant numbers and created a vibrant community that lasted until the 1920s. When, after a slow demise, it became part of the Sam Houston National Forest in 1936, the colony's history and even its location were silenced by the past.

From the publisher: Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republic examines a landmark decision in American jurisprudence, the first Supreme Court case to deal with the thorny legal issue of interstate commerce.Decided in 1824, Gibbons v. Ogden arose out of litigation between owners of rival steamboat lines over passenger and freight routes between the neighboring states of New York and New Jersey. But what began as a local dispute over the right to ferry the paying public from the New Jersey shore to New York City soon found its way into John Marshall’s court and constitutional history. The case is consistently ranked as one of the twenty most significant Supreme Court decisions and is still taught in constitutional law courses, cited in state and federal cases, and quoted in articles on constitutional, business, and technological history.Gibbons v. Ogden initially attracted enormous public attention because it involved the development of a new and sensational form of technology. To early Americans, steamboats were floating symbols of progress—cheaper and quicker transportation that could bring goods to market and refinement to the backcountry. A product of the rough-and-tumble world of nascent capitalism and legal innovation, the case became a landmark decision that established the supremacy of federal regulation of interstate trade, curtailed states’ rights, and promoted a national market economy. The case has been invoked by prohibitionists, New Dealers, civil rights activists, and social conservatives alike in debates over federal regulation of issues ranging from labor standards to gun control. This lively study fills in the social and political context in which the case was decided—the colorful and fascinating personalities, the entrepreneurial spirit of the early republic, and the technological breakthroughs that brought modernity to the masses.

James S. Olson is a Distinguished Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. He has written widely on a diverse set of topics, including popular culture, immigration to the United States, and the history of cancer. He also has a special interest in Vietnam and has edited the Dictionary of the Vietnam War (1988) and written The Vietnam War: Handbook of the Literature and Research (1993) and with Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam. Olson is the author of many other books and articles, including The Ethnic Dimension in American History, Second Edition; Saving Capitalism; Bathsheba's Breast; and with Randy Roberts, John Wayne: American.

FINALIST FOR THE 2016 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY.From the publisher: A groundbreaking investigation examining the fate of Union veterans who won the war but couldn’t bear the peace.For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative. These veterans― tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions― tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome reminders to a new America eager to heal, forget, and embrace the freewheeling bounty of the Gilded Age. Mining previously untapped archives, Jordan uncovers anguished letters and diaries, essays by amputees, and gruesome medical reports, all deeply revealing of the American psyche. In the model of twenty-first-century histories like Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering or Maya Jasanoff ’s Liberty’s Exiles that illuminate the plight of the common man, Marching Home makes almost unbearably personal the rage and regret of Union veterans. Their untold stories are critically relevant today.

Geographical Knowledge and Imperial Culture in the Early Modern Ottoman EmpireBy Pinar EmiraliogluFrom the publisher: Exploring the reasons for a flurry of geographical works in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, this study analyzes how cartographers, travellers, astrologers, historians and naval captains promoted their vision of the world and the centrality of the Ottoman Empire in it. It proposes a new case study for the interconnections among empires in the period, demonstrating how the Ottoman Empire shared political, cultural, economic, and even religious conceptual frameworks with contemporary and previous world empires.http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=9781472415332&lang=cy-GB

The Enemy Within Never Did Without: German and Japanese Prisoners of War at Camp Huntsville, 1942-1945.Edited by Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. FordFrom the publisher: Between 1943 and 1945, Camp Huntsville housed roughly 4,700 German POWs and experienced tense relations between incarcerated Nazi and anti-Nazi factions. Then, during the last months of the war, the American military selected Camp Huntsville as the home of its top-secret re-education program for Japanese POWs.The irony of teaching Japanese prisoners about democracy and voting rights was not lost on African Americans in East Texas who faced disenfranchisement and racial segregation. Nevertheless, the camp did inspire some Japanese prisoners to support democratization of their home country when they returned to Japan after the war. Meanwhile, in this country, the US government sold Camp Huntsville to Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1946, and the site served as the school’s Country Campus through the mid-1950s.http://www.tamupress.com/product/Enemy-Within-Never-Did-Without,8111.aspx

A People's War On Poverty: Urban Politics and Grassroots Activists in HoustonBy Wesley G. PhelpsFrom the publisher: In A People’s War on Poverty, Wesley G. Phelps investigates the on-the-ground implementation of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty during the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that the fluid interaction between federal policies, urban politics, and grassroots activists created a significant site of conflict over the meaning of American democracy and the rights of citizenship that historians have largely overlooked. In Houston in particular, the War on Poverty spawned fierce political battles that revealed fundamental disagreements over what democracy meant, how far it should extend, and who should benefit from it. Many of the program’s implementers took seriously the federal mandate to empower the poor as they pushed for a more participatory form of democracy that would include more citizens in the political, cultural, and economic life of the city.http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/peoples_war_on_poverty/

The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History: 3 vols.Edited by Kenneth E. Hendrickson IIIFrom the publisher: The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History is a three-volume work of over 1,000 entries on the rise and spread of the Industrial Revolution across the world. Entries comprise accessible but scholarly explorations of topics from the “aerospace industry” to “zaibatsu.” Contributor articles not only address topics of technology and technical innovation but emphasize the individual human and social experience of industrialization. Entries include generous selections of biographical figures and human communities, with articles on entrepreneurs, working men and women, families, and organizations. They also cover legal developments, disasters, and the environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution. Each entry also includes cross-references and a brief list of suggested readings to alert readers to more detailed information. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810888876/The-Encyclopedia-of-the-Industrial-Revolution-in-World-History-3-Volumes#

The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900-1941By Bernadette Pruitt, PhDFrom the publisher: The twentieth century has seen two great waves of African American migration from rural areas into the city, changing not only the country’s demographics but also black culture. In her thorough study of migration to Houston, Bernadette Pruitt portrays the move from rural to urban homes in Jim Crow Houston as a form of black activism and resistance to racism.Between 1900 and 1950 nearly fifty thousand blacks left their rural communities and small towns in Texas and Louisiana for Houston. Jim Crow proscription, disfranchisement, acts of violence and brutality, and rural poverty pushed them from their homes; the lure of social advancement and prosperity based on urban-industrial development drew them. Houston’s close proximity to basic minerals, innovations in transportation, increased trade, augmented economic revenue, and industrial development prompted white families, commercial businesses, and industries near the Houston Ship Channel to recruit blacks and other immigrants to the city as domestic laborers and wage earners.http://www.tamupress.com/product/Other-Great-Migration,7543.aspx

The Myth of the Press Gang: Volunteers, Impressment and the Naval Manpower Problem in the Late Eighteenth CenturyBy J. Ross DancyFrom the publisher: The press gang is generally regarded as the means by which the British navy solved the problem of recruiting enough seamen in the late eighteenth century. This book, however, based on extensive original research conducted primarily in a large number of ships' muster books, demonstrates that this view is false. It argues that, in fact, the overwhelming majority of seamen in the navy were there of their own free will. Taking a long view across the late eighteenth century but concentrating on the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815, the book provides great detail on the sort of men that were recruited and the means by which they were recruited, and includes a number of individuals' stories. It shows how manpower was a major concern for the Admiralty; how the Admiralty put in place a range of recruitment methods including the quota system; how it worried about depleting merchant shipping of sufficient sailors; and how, although most seamen were volunteers, the press gang was resorted to, especially during the initial mobilisation at the beginning of wars and to find certain kinds of particularly skilled seamen.http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=14694

The Pillars of Reaganomics: A Generation of Wisdom from Arthur Laffer and the Supply Side RevolutionsEdited By Brian Domitrovic, PhDFrom the publisher: “’Supply-side economics’ – a combination of tax cuts and a commitment to a strong and stable dollar – sustained an economic renaissance that only ended with the Keynesian resurgence in 2008,” said Dr. Domitrovic. “Remarkably, little of the written output of the giants of the supply-side revolution has been made available to wide audiences. This book is a collection of ten of the greatest hits of Laffer Associates.” The issues range from policy recommendations to overcome economic stagnation through tax cuts and a stable value of money; addressing economic inequality; and achieving social security solvency through economic growth – many of the same issues the U.S. faces today. “This book is a record of the last generation’s ideas for solving these problems — a manual for how to get out of our economic funk today. We hope that the next Congress will take advantage of this book to guide them in policymaking.”http://www.laffercenter.com/pillars-reaganomics-amazon-com/