“You see a really big gap between the advances in the field of history and what’s represented in Texas public history,” said Monica Muñoz Martinez, an assistant professor at Brown University and the author of The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, a recently published book about racial violence along the Texas-Mexico border. “For generations, the idea among historians was, if you get a good education and you go to a good school and you write good books, that’s what’s required to make a mark on the public understanding of the past.” If that was ever the case, she believes, it isn’t now.
She’s hardly alone in her pessimism. “I think Texas history is broken,” said Ty Cashion, a historian at Sam Houston State University. In the second half of the twentieth century, young historians brought new energy and new approaches to countless subjects such as Tejano history, African American history, Native American history, women’s history, and labor history. These historians—often referred to as “revisionists,” though many of them reject the term— wanted to show that Texas had a richer and more interesting story than older historians would have it. But the change in public consciousness many hoped for hasn’t happened. “In 1991 traditional history was moribund,” said Cashion. “Scholars were assuming that a new usable past would emerge and push all the gunsmoke and horseshit away. But it’s still standing.”
“In the nineties I was optimistic that things would change,” said Walter Buenger, a history professor at UT-Austin. “Momentum seemed to be on the side of the historians who were trying to present an alternate history. But that has not happened.” The history that has the most appeal to some members of the public and is most useful to politicians, he said, is still “traditional history,” which means “white men on horseback and an emphasis on politics, the military, and the nineteenth century.”
Buenger believes traditional history is here to stay, whatever the scholars do. “The old history is useful to reinforce social status and undergird political ideology,” he said. “It undergirds white supremacy.” The old version of the story of Texas, he claims, makes people who have status—and are anxious about losing it—comfortable. More recent histories, by contrast, are complicated and discomfiting, and it’s rare in life that people choose to be uncomfortable.
But for all these academics’ self-doubt, there are signs that change—however slow, contested, and incremental—is happening. That’s why so many defenders of the Confederate States of America showed up to defeat Jacob Hale. The myth of the Lost Cause is gradually being rolled back, as the recent high-profile battles over Confederate statuary demonstrate. Valorization of the Confederacy is itself a revisionist history that must be constantly nourished and renewed, or it will wither. Like Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, it’s an uphill battle.