When Walter Buenger wants to explain to someone what history is, he starts with a simple question: when was that fancy façade on the Alamo–that funny gable that looks like the top of an ornate chest of drawers–constructed?
The building is iconic in Texas history and a near pilgrimage site for the thousands of students who visit each year, famous for the 1836 battle during the Texas Revolution. But it’s familiar façade wasn’t built until more than a decade after the battle.
“When the public thinks about the Alamo, they think about it with the façade being there,” Buenger, the chief historian for the Texas State Historical Association–TSHA. “That’s what passes in the minds of many for Texas history, something added onto after the fact.”
There are the popular stories we tell about ourselves, often in the guise of history. That’s the façade. It’s real but it’s not always as it seems.
“If a history of the Alamo was constructed in the 1890s that tells you about the 1890s and that’s good evidence for the 1890s, but it tells you nothing about the 1830s,” Buenger said. “It misleads you.”
This idea of history–that the way it’s been told is imperfect and needs continual revision — is at the heart of a battle in the courts for control of the state historical association. Founded in the 1890s, the TSHA publishes the online Handbook of Texas, the Texas Almanac, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and curricula for K-12 students. It is a remarkable institution that has helped tell the unwieldy, messy story of Texas. Buenger describes it as a “novel experiment for a history association,” tasked with bringing history to the public that has, since its earliest days, sought to commingle academic and non-academic members. Now, the two sides are at war, but they need each other. The academic board members help breath life into Texas history, unveiling new evidence, new storylines, new understandings of ourselves. And the lay people too bring their enthusiasm, insight, and, often, fundraising acumen. They all help spread the word of Texas history. The balance of non-academics and academics hasn’t always been easy but, in the past few months, it has turned into a possibly existential legal fight that parties on both sides say could affect the future of Texas history. Will the association focus on telling histories from the perspectives of marginalized groups or will it valorize traditional heroes? The characters in this struggle are about as colorful as the aggrandized figures they’re arguing over. The interim executive director, J.P. Bryan, Jr., has been described as a billionaire oilman. He laughed this off, telling us that he and his wife have given away most of the wealth that’s come their way. He proudly traces his ancestry all the way back to Stephen F. Austin’s family. He insists that what makes Texas great is an expansive enterprise. “It’s not some exclusive narrative,” he said. But he argues that that’s not currently happening at the association. “It’s in our quarterly and in our symposiums, at our annual meetings that we see the whole narrative dominated by villainization and victimization type of topics.”
Buenger, meanwhile, is the academic, a fifth-generation Texan and a self-described “old-fashioned” scholar dedicated to empirical research, and has been criticized by some for saying traditional history “undergirds white supremacy.” His interest in the nuances of history come from his own experience with his Anglo and German family members, who each shared very different stories about the Civil War. Protected by his endowed chair at the University of Texas and the prospect of retirement, he has become one of the most vocal historians sounding the alarm about Bryan.
The legal issue is the board’s composition, always split between academics and non-academics, and a disagreement about a new board member that boiled over at the association’s annual meeting in March. Bryan made a surprise nomination of Wallace Jefferson, a former Texas Supreme Court justice. “People were seriously standing up and yelling like it was the British freaking parliament,” Michelle Haas, who runs the Texas History Trust, told Texas Monthly.
In the end, the Bryan’s nominee lost the contest. As is standard, Buenger explained, the new board member, an adjunct professor at Texas A&M–Kingsville, was voted on by the association’s membership at the meeting, who approved her as one of the non-academic members. Bryan objected, arguing that the board wasn’t balanced.
The fight has been markedly personal. A court blocked a board vote to oust Bryan. He also sought personal damages between $250,000 and $1 million from the current board president, Nancy Baker Jones, for what court documents described as “insulting, offensive, libelous and slanderous remarks.”
From Bryan’s point of view, the association should be thanking him for stepping in as interim director. “This narrative is just so vile,” he said. “All I did was go in and find the TSHA in total disarray.” He says he helped raise money, tried to get financials in order and give more direction to the organization. In fact, the board did thank him in an agenda for a May meeting that was never held because of Bryan’s suit. In a document shared by Bryan, one agenda item offers “deep thanks and appreciation” to Bryan for “having offered his time, energy, knowledge, dedication, and resources.” What stuck out to Bryan was the proposal to completely restructure the executive office. “Ninety- nine percent of funding comes from non-academics,” Bryan insisted. “For only contributing 1 percent toward the future financial health of the organization, (academics get) a 50 percent vote” as members of the board.
“That’s what this fight’s all about.” But it’s also about something else: who gets to speak. “There’s only one narrative they want in the debate,” Bryan said of the association’s scholarly journal. “I want to see both sides represented at the table.” Both sides? Bryan acknowledges there are far more than two perspectives on Texas history but he still sometimes speaks in those terms. History must be far, far bigger than “both.” Raúl Ramos, a history professor at the University of Houston who studies Texas history, has not been personally involved with the battle for control of the TSHA but as a member has followed it closely. He compares the situation to an 1897 controversy when Bay City lawmaker Alexander Hensley questioned whether the UT history department adequately honored the traditions of Texas. Ramos sees this type of argument again and again, whether it’s about the Alamo, the 1836 Project or even tenure at our universities.
“There’s a sense that there’s a true Texas history that is a platonic ideal that exists out there somewhere and that it needs gatekeepers rather than a history that is always imperfect,” he said.
The field of history, along with most everything else in higher education, has undergone a shift. But it’s not because of the culture wars or much-publicized campus fights over guest speakers. Ramos instead traces it back to the GI Bill that helped open the doors not just to college but to academic careers. New people, new perspectives began slowly contributing to what had been a rather narrow conception of our history. Research proceeded with the standards of evidence and peer review that still guide the profession, but the terrain widened. What were women doing during all this? Indigenous people? “I think most people would see that as rich, as exciting, as full of possibility,” Ramos said. Many of those possibilities fill the pages of the association’s quarterly. In the most recent issue, John Willingham argues that the controversial 2021 book “Forget the Alamo” overstates the role that slavery played in the revolution, particularly in regard to the Battle of the Alamo. Ultimately, the author argues that the “cause” is more complicated but the slavery- affirming result is certainly clear enough. Willingham, who has a master’s degree in American history but not a Ph.D., is also an example of the range of people who publish in the quarterly, not all of whom are practicing academic researchers affiliated with a university.
“Many of the people that write for us are new or emerging scholars,” Buenger said. “What appears in the quarterly meets the standards of the profession as they exist now,” meaning they are peer reviewed and evaluated based on the strength of their evidence, argument and contribution. While Bryan believes lay members feel excluded, historians worry that the lawsuit will destroy or dramatically reshape the association, deterring new academic members. It won’t stop a researcher from doing good work but it could stop that work from being shared with the broader public through this uniquely publicly-oriented organization.
“We dedicated our professional lives to this,” Ramos said. “We care deeply about Texas history and the people of Texas. As academics, we go into this to uphold scholarly rigor and values but also to improve society because we feel like a society that is able to understand its past in a complex way is going to be a better society going forward.”
Texas history has long been overlooked in the broader historical community but it’s here where the South meets the West, where Mexico meets the United States and where all manner of borders and peoples have made and remade what it means to be Texan. Ramos calls Texas a Rosetta Stone of American history. Understanding our past is a matter of national if not international interest.
In recent years, that history has flourished, with scholarship on everything from the way Black families from rural Texas and Louisiana helped shape Houston, to how Mexican communities memorialized the violence inflicted upon them, sometimes by state actors, to how the events preceding the Texas Revolution place Texas not in the center of some myopic myth but at the heart of a much larger global story.
We applaud Bryan’s dedication and philanthropy. He believes in Texas history. We believe the historians speaking out against his lawsuit, including via a petition asking him to rescind it, do as well. Both Bryan and Buenger are past presidents and believe the organization is in peril for different reasons. While historians have given their professional lives to this work, Bryan has also contributed, opening the Bryan Museum in Galveston. Bryan told us that he views the lawsuit as a last resort, but we’d urge him to reconsider and for everyone involved to find a way to preserve the great work that the association does, the sanctity of the academic process and scholarly journal, as well as the high standards of its public-facing handbook that has served as a guide for thousands of Texans to better understand their home.
