The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 74, July 1970 - April, 1971 Page: 579

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Book Reviews

Miss Friend, perhaps not unintentionally, has also pricked our col-
lective conscience as historians. In collecting and arranging Webb's
reviews and comments she has forced us to recall his most basic belief
regarding history. The clear thrust of Webb's argument, evident in
almost every review included in the book, is that children need to
read history in every form, going far beyond assigned texts. He made
use of every device available to a publicist-contests, prizes, meetings,
even parables-to addict the children of Texas to the study of history.
Unlike many of us he never scorned the authors of school textbooks
as "intellectual prostitutes"; rather he collaborated with Eugene C.
Barker to write highly readable and solidly founded junior high school
texts.
How many of us have shirked our responsibilities as professional
historians and sworn an eternal vow of apathy toward the teaching
of history below the college or university level? In how many schools
is history being taught part time by a school administrator or an
athletic coach? How often is the high school history program the
product, not of an historian, but of a child-guidance expert, a vocab-
ulary specialist, a computer programmer interested in merchandising
"teaching machines," or a manipulator of audio-visual aids?
Miss Friend's book does not bear the jocular onus placed upon Ellen
Schultz's Texas Wild Flowers by W. P. Webb, that it "came too late!"
Talks on Texas Books is timely and the Introduction makes a contri-
bution of major value to the historiography of Texas and the Western
World. To paraphrase Webb, "There should be a Texas Book Shelf in
your school and Llerena Friend's book should be on it."
United States Coast Guard Academy JOHN F. MURPHY
Early Literary Magazines of Texas. By Imogene Bentley Dickey. (Aus-
tin: Steck-Vaughn Company, 197o. Pp. x + io8. Appendix, index.
$5.95.)
Although the author suggests in her introduction that the early
Texas literary magazines furnish a valuable history of their times, her
book makes slight pretense at elaborating the picture of the state's
cultural life contained in these journals. As a bibliographical guide
Early Literary Magazines of Texas may prove useful enough to re-
searchers, but as perceptive analysis of the subject covered, the volume
is slim indeed. Professor Dickey deals with forty periodicals which she

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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 74, July 1970 - April, 1971, periodical, 1971; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101200/m1/591/ocr/: accessed March 29, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.

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