2005-06
 

PhD graduates Jimmy Bryan, Bonnie Martin, and Francis Galan  with dissertations advisers David Weber and Sherry Smith.

doctoral             degrees      awarded

Although he will not admit to any epiphany in his study of history, Jimmy Bryan told Sherry Smith, the Director of Graduate Studies, that his decision to embark on graduate study, “…derives from my early realization that I was a writer and storyteller, and history attracted me for the stories I could discover,”--not a bad set of traits for an historian.  After a number of jobs following high school graduation, he recognized the importance of a university education and, after receiving his BA and MA from the University of Texas, Arlington, made it his goal to obtain a PhD.  

Under the direction of Sherry Smith and David Weber, his PhD dissertation investigates antebellum era expansionism through cultural and social lenses.   He was particularly interested in gauging the extent to which the dominant cultural marker of the time, romanticism, revealed itself in the men who migrated west to places such as Texas or who volunteered to fight in the US-Mexico War.  In particular, he has pursued evidence of adventurism in diaries and letters.  Adventurism is often rather cavalierly thrown into the mix of explanations regarding nineteenth-century men’s migration, without sufficient substantiation.  Jimmy systematically investigated it.  Moreover, he approached adventurism with a sophisticated understanding of how deeply implicated it was in gender, class, race, and ethnic tensions of the time.  The West, Texas, and Mexico were all places riven with upheaval and those men who moved to these places often found themselves in situations that revealed deeply set, yet constantly negotiated ideas about manhood and whiteness.  His dissertation will undoubtedly swell Jimmy’s growing list of publications, which include several articles, a book edited for the SMU Press and a biography of Walter P. Lane, the subject of his MA thesis, that will be published by the Texas A&M Press.  He has had visiting appointments at Western Washington University, the University of Nevada, Reno, and currently is teaching at the University of Texas, Dallas.

 Francis Galan is the son of Cuban immigrants who came to the United States in 1962.  The experience of his parents played a significant role in nourishing his interest in the past.  He remembers that “All my father ever seemed to talk about while [I was] growing up was the Cuban revolution and my interest in history emerged from discussions with him.”  This led Francis to the University of Texas where he received a BA in Latin American Studies and an MA in History from the University of Texas, San Antonio.

Galan’s PhD dissertation, directed by David Weber, examines the triangular relationship among Spanish settlers, French merchants/traders and Caddo Indians in the Louisiana/Texas borderlands between 1721 and 1773.  He focuses particularly on the Presidido Los Adaes and uses that place as a focal point to investigate those three relationships.  He concludes that these groups  were accommodating one another—quite a contrast to the initial Spanish conquest of East Texas, which was disastrous.  When the Spanish returned, however, in the 1720s, they found the French had established a pattern of relationships based on kinship and commerce.  That pattern prevailed for the next fifty years, as the Spanish were dependent upon both the French and the Caddo in this area. Francis’s dissertation is a contribution to our growing knowledge of the complexities of borderlands communities, shedding light on interactions—and in locales—which have rarely captured the attention of historians.  Francis currently has a teaching position at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio.

Bonnie Martin, a member of an itinerant Air Force family, early internalized her mother’s dedication to community service, and became a pro bono family law attorney, assisting poor women and women made suddenly poor by divorce.  Her PhD dissertation, “To Have and To Hold…Human Collateral: Mortgaging Slaves to Build Virginia and South Carolina,” written under the direction of David Weber, reflects her interest in and empathy with those who are victims of their circumstances and times.  Her work reopens a mostly forgotten chapter of slave history—the mortgaging of slaves for the purpose of raising cash and credit.  She analyzed more than six thousand mortgages in the public records of Virginia and South Carolina from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Although she deals with a great deal of “data,” Bonnie never forgets that each mortgage is a human drama filled with borrowers giving tenders property “To Have and To Hold” that included men, women, and children.  According to Bonnie, “Showing how people used each other in the past for personal gain gives me the opportunity to discuss more positive models of civic and economic cooperation.  When one group exploits another, even if unconsciously, a social debt builds that one day has to be repaid.” 

Bonnie completed her research and writing under the auspices of a prestigious fellowship from the Association of American University Women.  As a Clements Department of History Research Fellow this year, she will extend the range of her resear*ch into Louisiana, a task that was postponed by Hurricane Katrina.  Bonnie’s lively and generous spirit and community building skills made the department a better place during her time with us, for which we are all in her debt. 

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