The Junior Historian, Volume 20, Number 2, November 1959 Page: Front Inside
32 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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THE TEXAS STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
1897-THE OLDEST LEARNED SOCIETY IN TEXAS-1897
President:
MERLE DUNCANVice-Presidents:
FRED R. COTTEN
GEORGE P. ISBELL STUART McGREGOR
J. P. BRYANDirector:
H. BAILEY CARROLL
Cor. Sec. and Treas.:
MRS. CORAL HORTON TULLIS----
THE JUNIOR HISTORIAN
Published by
The Texas State Historical Association
Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center
Box 8011, University Station,
University of Texas, Austin 12, Texas
Editor:
H. BAILEY CARROLL
Associate Editors:CHESTER V. KIELMAN
FRANCES V. PARKER
"No man is fit to be entrusted with the control of the PRESENT
who is ignorant of the PAST, and no People who are indi ferent
to their PAST need hope to make their FUTURE great."
Issued six times during the school year in: September, November, December, January, March, and
May. Regular subscription $2.00; club subscription (five or more to Chapter members) $1.50
each. Entered as second-class matter February 21, 1945, at the post office at Austin, Texas, under
the Act of March 3, 1879.
THE HISTORICAL FRAME OF MIND
by SAVOIE LOTTINVILLECorinna Lindon Smith tells of riding horse-
back in the wake of a cowboy guide out West
many years ago. As the day wore on, the cow-
boy began humming a ditty to himself: "I'd
rather be sentenced to jail or Congress than
live with my mother-in-law the rest of my
life."
Somewhere there must be a place for his-
torians, too, who are wordy, unimaginative,
unable to produce interesting detail, and awk-
ward in recreating what is past. Much pother
has been written about ways of writing history.
But basically history is as simple as the ways
people lived and what they thought and said
and did.
Nearly thirty years of watching the often
herculean efforts of historians, young and old,
to recreate reality have only confirmed in me
an early belief that the historical problem,
after the facts have been gathered, is mainly
a literary one-how to say interestingly and
accurately what went on.
This is not to say that the problem is easy.
But we often make more work of it than we
should. Let us take a favorite of mine, which
I think every young person and old shouldread and take to heart. Once read, it will never
be forgotten. It is the opening situation in a
historical essay that Professor Carl Becker
wrote about Kansas quite a long time ago. He
wanted to explain historically why Kansans
had developed the same kind of love and loyal-
ty for Kansas that Texans had developed for
Texas, for example.
He remembered riding on a train with two
Kansas school girls as they were returning
from a year in boarding school in the East.
After the train had got well into Kansas, with
its flat, monotonous landscape, the tracks lined
with sunflowers and not muzh else, he heard
one school girl sigh to the other, "Dear old
Kansas!"
That is the way people are. They love the
country in which they were born and brought
up-no matter how flat it is. The job of the
historian is to recognize this fact and not get
involved in complexities that only confuse
reality.
I once asked Professor Walter Prescott
Webb, of the University of Texas, whom I con-
sider the greatest historian in our country to-
day, just how he had got started writing. I
[continued on page 24]
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Texas State Historical Association. The Junior Historian, Volume 20, Number 2, November 1959, periodical, November 1959; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth391541/m1/2/?q=Lamar+University: accessed June 9, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.