Texas’s Most Famous Historian Looks Back at His Own, Legendary Life
While working in the archives at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, the historian Michael Collins came across what he describes, somewhat hyperbolically, as “a buried treasure—pure gold, at least in a figurative sense.” It was the unfinished autobiography of Walter Prescott Webb, perhaps the most famous historian the Lone Star State has ever produced. Webb drafted the manuscript in his mid-fifties while spending the 1942–1943 academic year at the University of Oxford as the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History and then apparently set it aside. Though Collins, as he began reading the narrative in the summer of 2008, anticipated “the stale chronicle of a stodgy, pedantic old professor’s life and academic career,” he concluded instead…View Original Post
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Source: Texas Monthly