Amid New McCarthyism, the Alliance for Texas History Embraces Diverse Scholarship

Historian Nancy Baker Jones was a child when her father who was serving in the U S Army in Europe was called home in to testify at U S Senator Joseph McCarthy s hearings on an alleged communist spy ring at an army laboratory in Fort Monmouth New Jersey During McCarthy s four-year reactionary crusade to root out card carrying Communists hundreds of executive Hollywood and university employees were imprisoned and thousands more lost their jobs and were blacklisted despite a lack of evidence they were subverting the administration After what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings the senator s meteoric popularity just as expeditiously plummeted and in December he was censured by the U S Senate for behavior that worked to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate Reading from an excerpt of her autobiography at the Alliance for Texas History s first annual conference which people attended at Texas State University May - Jones recounted her lifelong career helping to build African-American and women s history programs in Texas universities during the social movements of the s and s and expanding the state s historical encyclopedia called the Handbook of Texas to reflect diverse narratives starting in the s Jones warned the audience of a new McCarthyism arising and reminded them of the role historians can play to combat it The Alliance for Texas History was created from our own messy reality of history at a time when war appears to have been declared on our profession We have already faced a intricate truth and started something new in the world so that we will not repeat the past This alliance was formed last year after Jones who was serving as board president of the -year-old Texas State Historical Association TSHA was sued and ousted by TSHA s executive director and oil tycoon J P Bryan Bryan sought to stack the board with conservative non-academic historians over professional historians who he reported the Galveston Daily News want to demean the Anglo efforts in settling the western part of the United States for the purpose of spreading freedoms for all The struggle to chronicle our state and national past to determine whose history is communicated or not informed continues to play out across Texas from the state Capitol to libraries museums and the classroom Concerns about state action that could restrict the work of academic historians arose in conversations and presentations during the historical conference Ben Johnson co-editor of the Alliance s Journal for Texas History opened the conference with a speech describing the current situation for historians Until the last limited years never in my lifetime did state officeholders cancel book signings did legislatures create laws banning the teaching of particular historical texts or concepts or crowds gather to protest and sometimes remove statues of historical figures Nationally and in various states particularly Texas history has become a venue for political and social combat Two weeks after the May conference state lawmakers passed Senate Bill a new law that will strip from university faculty members their control over curricula and faculty hiring and hand this decision-making power to an institutional governing board A statewide curriculum advisory committee chosen by the Texas Higher Training Coordinating Board will also have the power to decide required curricula for all higher learning institutions from locality colleges to anatomical schools Under the new law governor appointees will also be empowered to investigate and recommend the withholding of funding for universities identified to be noncompliant with SB or Senate Bill a law that banned diversity equity and inclusion DEI programs in Texas community colleges and universities In the final version of SB lawmakers removed a provision mandating faculty not advocate or promote the idea that any race sex or ethnicity or any religious belief is inherently superior language that professors testified could have been used to censor conversations in regime and history courses especially During one of the conference s panels Teaching LGBTQ History in Texas academic historians grappled with how to include the topic in their classrooms during a time of increasing state surveillance of universities Lauren Gutterman a University of Texas at Austin American Studies professor shared how SB has already had a chilling effect among UT students and faculty even though the law did not impact curricula or research Guest lectures on LGBTQ topics were canceled by UT administrators due to preemptive over-compliance with SB and faculty were self censoring out of fear Gutterman stated attendees SB is going much further in increasing governing body oversight of what happens in our classes So I can only imagine the kind of self-censorship and then the actual censorship that we experience from the administration is just going to be heightened Gutterman recounted the Texas Observer Over the past year it s been more intricate for her department to recruit graduate students and the UT faculty regularly ask each other Are you in the industry Are you leaving It s just a kind of ubiquitous concern Gutterman commented She and other historians at the conference encouraged their colleagues not to self-censor Gutterman notified the Observer that faculty members need to push back against the kind of anticipatory compliance or over-compliance beyond what the law required While the state is narrowing what students can learn in the classroom the Alliance for Texas History has opened up their call for diverse histories to be presented at their conference and in their publication During the conference historians faculty members and graduate students shared their research and concerns and received feedback from their colleagues without fear of reprisal The Alliance for Texas History is taking the broadest doable approach to the Texas past Gutterman announced It s particularly significant at a moment when our state leaders have demonstrated that they don t want students to have a really full inclusive accounting of our state or national past Alliance for Texas History conference Courtesy Adam Clark Johnson revealed in his speech The irony of all of these restrictions on history is that they come at a time when the scrutiny of the Texas past in population is robust more inclusive more expansive and more nationally prominent than ever before Over the three days of the conference academic historians museum curators constituents school students and other individuals selected from a effort of panels to attend on topics as diverse as New Deal Texas Trailblazers in Twentieth-Century Texas Sports Racial Ideology Eugenics and the State Fair of Texas and The Revitalization of the Karankawa In closing the conference Jones assured attendees the Alliance for Texas History would continue to embrace the histories of all Texans Facing tough truths about the past moving forward with new understanding and assuring that we do not repeat what should not be repeated This is what historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt called the messy reality of history There is no finality She disclosed that it is a story with multiple beginnings but no ends We are free to change the world and to start something new in it and when we do that that is a healing act The post Amid New McCarthyism the Alliance for Texas History Embraces Diverse Scholarship appeared first on The Texas Observer