Texas State Historical Association

The Texas State Historical Association is a nonprofit organization, founded in Austin in 1897, that promotes the collection, preservation and publication of material on the history of Texas.¹ It publishes the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, the oldest learned journal published continuously in the state, and the Handbook of Texas, an encyclopedia of the state that has appeared online since 1999, and it holds an annual meeting for academic and independent historians.¹ Its offices are on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.¹

Founding

Ten people interested in the state’s history met at the University of Texas on February 13, 1897, to discuss forming a society. George P. Garrison, Eugene Digges and Charles Corner drafted a constitution, and 250 people were invited to an organizational meeting in Austin on March 2, 1897.¹ About twenty five attended, in the Capitol office of the Commissioner of Agriculture, Insurance, Statistics, and History. Former governor Oran M. Roberts was elected president and Garrison secretary and librarian.¹ The lighting failed that evening, and the meeting went on by the light of two lanterns, which the association adopted as its symbol.¹ The same meeting argued over the standing of women members, a dispute that ended with John S. Ford leaving the room.¹

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

The journal began in July 1897 as the Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association. Its early issues printed many letters, diaries, journals and memoirs, in keeping with Roberts’s view that the members’ task was to furnish facts for a future history more than to write one; that kind of private source is the subject of an essay on family Bibles and private registers.¹ Under the influence of Herbert Eugene Bolton, a new title, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, took effect with the July 1912 issue.² Garrison was the first editor, and for most of its history the editorship stayed with members of the history faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.² Back volumes are available through the Portal to Texas History at the University of North Texas and through JSTOR and Project MUSE.²

Handbook of Texas

The association began publishing books in 1917.¹ Its best known work, The Handbook of Texas, edited by Walter P. Webb and H. Bailey Carroll, appeared in two volumes in 1952 as the first encyclopedia devoted to a single state, with more than 16,500 articles; a supplementary volume followed in 1976.¹ A revision begun in 1982 was published in 1996 as The New Handbook of Texas in six volumes, and the Handbook of Texas Online opened on February 15, 1999, with more than 25,000 articles that continue to be revised.¹ In 2008 the association acquired the Texas Almanac, first published in 1857, from the Dallas Morning News.¹

Handbook entries serve this site as a standard reference, among them the article on James W. Throckmorton, governor from 1866 to 1867.³ Readers following the terms historians use for the years after 1874 can set the Handbook’s usage beside the discussion in Redemption Is a Word Historians Argue Over.

Annual meeting

The first official annual meeting took place in Austin on June 17, 1897.¹ Meetings were held in Austin during the first week of March until 1968, when the association met in San Antonio during HemisFair; since 2000 the meeting has moved among cities around the state.¹ An auction of donated books, artifacts and works of art raises money for the association.¹ The meeting’s own site describes a program of about 100 speakers in more than 30 panels and an attendance of over 700, and it announces the 2027 meeting for Abilene.⁴ Rosser Newton has presented at the annual meeting.⁵

Education programs and location

In 1939 the association started the Junior Historians of Texas for secondary school students. With Texas History Day, an affiliate of National History Day, the program became the association’s Educational Services Division by 1980, which also publishes the Texas Historian for student writers and oversees the Walter Prescott Webb Historical Society for college students.¹

The association was housed in the University of Texas history department and later in the Barker Texas History Center and Sid Richardson Hall. It left the university in November 2007, moved to the University of North Texas in Denton in November 2008, and announced its return to the Austin campus in May 2015.¹ As a private society it is distinct from the state agency that keeps the government’s archives, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

References

1. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Texas State Historical Association ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷

2. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Southwestern Historical Quarterly ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Throckmorton, James Webb ↩

4. Texas State Historical Association, TSHA Annual Meeting ↩

5. Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting, Presenter, Rosser Coke Newton ↩