Rewind: A Year in Review from the William P. Clements Department of History at SMU

                                                                2004-05


                      g r a d u a t e   s t u d e n t   d e g r e e s,
 p u b l i c a t i o n s,   p a p e r s,  a n d   a w a r d s
Matthew Babcock delivered a paper on “Peace by Deceit: Rethinking Apache Motivations for Settling on Spanish-run Reservations, 1786-1791” at the 2004 Western History Association Conference held in Las Vegas, Nevada.  He gave a second paper at the 2005 Texas State Historical Association Conference in Fort Worth, Texas, entitled “Turning Apaches into Spaniards: The Forgotten Indian Reservations of the West Texas Frontier.”

 Lee Berlet presented his thesis in July on "Free, Yet Inferior: The Paradox of Race Among Boston's 'Representative Men'" and was awarded an M.A. in history.

 Jimmy Bryan has accepted a one-year appointment as a visiting lecturer at the University of Nevada, Reno, teaching courses on the gendered and racial frontiers of North America; colonial America; the American Revolution; and the first half of the U.S. survey.

 Kristen Contos successfully defended her thesis, "Modernizing Motherhood: How Adoption Homes and Birth Control Centers Redefined Motherhood in North Texas, " and will officially receive an M.A. in December. In the meantime she plans to teach American history at North Harris College in Houston and apply to Ph.D. programs.

Jim Dudlo has a two-year position as a Visiting Scholar in History at Brookhaven College in Dallas, where he will be teaching U.S. survey courses. 

Bonnie Martin was awarded a $20,000 dissertation research fellowship by the Association of American University Women.  In addition, Martin is joining SMU's board for the Center for Teaching Excellence.

Helen McLure has been awarded the 2005 Ledesma Prize by the Coalition for Western Women's History.  The prize committee told her that it "was extremely impressed with the originality of your study on the involvement of women and children in western extra-legal violence, with its scope, and with its potential to stimulate new dialogue and additional research in an important and under studied field."  Helen will receive the prize at the Western History Association meeting in October in Scottsdale, Arizona.  

Amy Meschke, who was among the first group of students in 1998 to enroll
in the History Ph.D. Program, completed her dissertation in December on "Women's Lives Through Women's Wills in the Spanish and Mexican Borderlands, 1750-1847." She returned in May to participate in the History graduation ceremony and in the fall will begin a tenure track job at Georgia Southwestern State, which, she says, happily, is an hour from her home in Columbus. 

                                             Amy Meschke, receiving her diploma at the History graduation ceremony  on May 14;
                                                            Professor Sherry Smith, one of her dissertation advisers, speaking at  the podium;
                                                             and seated, members of the History faculty.

 Kristopher Paschall co-authored an article with Gregg Cantrell of TCU that appears in the July issue of the Southwest Historical Quarterly entitled “Texas Populism at High Tide: Jerome C. Kearby and the Case of the 6th Congressional District, 1894.”

José Ramirez published a review of Ian F. Haney López’s book on Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), in Journal of American Ethnic History (Winter 2004), vol. 23, no. 2.  He also contributed an entry on “Aztlán” to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, edited by Suzanne Oboler and Deena J. González (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Jeffrey Schulze was awarded a predoctoral fellowship in Race/Ethnic Relations at Texas Tech University. This award will allow him additional time to complete his dissertation and gain more teaching experience. He will teach Native American history and the U.S. survey. The fellowship is for 2005-06 and renewable for an additional year.

Clive Siegle received an award from the Dallas County Community College District as "Innovator of the Year" for 2004-05, and he has been named the executive director of the commission that will oversee the national bicentennial commemoration of Zebulon Pike's epic western expeditions.

 In August Art Tatman defended his M.A. thesis, "Colonia, Commerce, and Consuls: The Dallas Mexican Chamber of Commerce, the Early Years, 1939-1948" (with distinction according to his thesis committee) and will receive his degree in December.


                   d o c t o r a l   s t u d e n t s   w r i t e
d i s s e r t a t i o n s   o n   t h e   s o u t h w e s t

Since its inception in 1998, SMU’s Ph.D. Program in History has accepted a small number of students each year and currently has twenty-two students studying for their doctorates in American history with a special focus on the Southwest.  Following are synopses of the work of twelve of the program’s students who are in their fourth year or beyond and working at various stages on their dissertations.

Matthew Babcock
"Turning Apaches into Spaniards: North America's Forgotten Indian Reservations"
Babcock's dissertation addresses the unrecognized historical experience of thousands of Apaches who settled on reservations near Spanish presidios a century before Geronimo's surrender in 1886.  It explains how and why Spaniards transformed presidios from bases for offensive and defensive war into zones of peace called "establecimientos de paz" or "peace establishments."  It also examines Apache motives for making peace, the reasons some groups remained independent, and the extent of their acculturation.  Finally, it explores the reasons for the system's decline and collapse under Mexican control from 1821-1831 and the short and long-term effects of this experience on Apache culture.

Constance Bradford
“Women’s Experiences in Texas Institutions of Higher Learning, 1880-1920”
A study of the experiences of women in Texas institutions of higher learning from 1880 to 1920, this study explores, compares, and contrasts the changing social and educational environments in which women of differing races and economic classes found themselves, and the resulting negotiation of these changed spaces. Bradford’s dissertation will assess the impact of the schools and the women on each other as well as on their surrounding communities.

Jimmy Bryan Jr.
"The American Elsewhere: Adventurism and Manliness in the Age of Expansion, 1814-1848”
Bryan explores the phenomenon of adventurism in the early 19th century United States, showing how it revealed ideas of masculinity and influenced the territorial expansion of the nation.

Alicia Dewey
“Risk, Opportunity and Failure: ‘Going Broke’ in the Texas Borderlands, 1898-1941”
 By studying bankruptcy cases filed under the Bankruptcy Act of 1898, Dewey will examine how different people coped with difficult economic circumstances in selected counties along or near the Texas/Mexico border.  She is interested in studying what drew these people to the borderlands, strategies they employed to make a living and/or achieve the “American Dream,” and why they experienced financial failure.  She will also explore cultural attitudes toward debt and bankruptcy and the growing role of the federal court in mediating debtor/creditor relationships.

 Edward James Dudlo
“Martial Borderland: The U.S. Army and the Incorporation of New Mexico, 1846-1912”
Dudlo’s work explores the dynamic political, economic, and social relationships that are created and cultivated as borderlands are incorporated into modern nation states. As instruments of state incorporation, he is particularly interested in the varied roles of national military forces in these processes.

Francis Galán
“Last Soldiers, First Pioneers: The Los Adaes Border Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1721-1779”
One hundred years prior to the arrival of Stephen F. Austin’s colony in Texas, the last soldiers of the Spanish empire from Mexico established a military fort at Los Adaes on the Louisiana-Texas frontier. For the next half century, Los Adaes served as the capital of Texas under Spain until it was abandoned in 1773, a casualty of base realignment in the wake of the French and Indian War and the transfer of Louisiana to Spain. Undaunted by Spanish imperial designs and hostility from raiding Comanche warriors, the soldiers/settlers at Los Adaes returned to East Texas and founded the present town of Nacogdoches in 1779.

Bonnie Martin
“‘To Have and To Hold’…Human Collateral: Mortgaging Slaves to Build Virginia and South Carolina”
Martin, who holds a degree in law, explores the economic impact of human collateral.  The phrase “to have and to hold” evokes images of the most solemn commitments to cherish and  defend. These words, however, are derived from the law of contracts, themselves solemn and binding  commitments with the force of the state behind them. In 18th and 19th-century Anglo-America, slave owners gave creditors the right “to have and to hold” human collateral in return for cash and credit--cash and credit that accelerated the development of what would become the United States.

Helen McLure
“'I Suppose You Think Strange the Murder of Women and Children': Whitecapping and Lynching in the American West, 1870-1930”
McLure will document and analyze particularly lethal and non-lethal vigilante and mob attacks on women and children of all races and ethnicities in the West and Southwest during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Paul Nelson
"Utah's Canyon Country: Hope and Experience Encounter an American Desert"
Nelson is working on a human-environmental history of Southern Utah's Canyonlands, tracing exploration, settlements, booms, and busts in this desert region. In particular, he is focusing on religious ideology and optimism as they shaped peoples' understanding of the area.

José Ramírez
“Tejanos in World War I: Here and Over There”
Ramírez will show how Mexican Texans and the U.S. government cooperated with each other during the war despite a deep-seated mutual distrust. His research has taken him to the Library of Congress, the archives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Military Intelligence Division.

Jeffrey Schulze
“Trans-Nations: Indians, Imagined Communities, and Borderlands Realities in the Twentieth Century”
Schulze explores indigenous groups that have communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border, focusing on the ways in which their transnational orientation has proven to be both beneficial and problematic in their struggles to maintain group cohesion and cultural continuity.

Clive Siegle
“Ciboleros and Sharps Rifles: Hispanics, Anglos, and the Great Buffalo Harvest, 1785-1879”
This examination of the activities of ciboleros (buffalo hunters) from the Southern Plains of New Mexico, Mexico, and Texas from 1775 to 1878, focuses on Rath City, Texas, during the period of 1875-1878. Siegle compares and contrasts the ciboleros and the Rath City groups during the period when they coexisted in the final, climactic throes of “the great buffalo slaughter.”