The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989 Page: 56
682 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
had gone to his office for his signature on my dissertation, that I was
involved in an obscure drama of self-vindication; and once again I was
relieved to have, at the end of the conference session, a warm greeting
and appreciative comment from Webb.
At the height of his career at this point, Webb had the year before
been elected president of the American Historical Association, an
honor that, owing to coincidental circumstance, I had been the first to
announce. This circumstance had occurred in the spring of 1957, when
Webb had come to the LSU campus to give the nineteenth series of the
Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. As one of his
former students I had been asked to preside at the third session of the
lectures. While I was making my way toward the lecture room in Himes
Hall, T. Harry Williams caught up with me and said that he had learned
that Webb had been nominated for the presidency of the AHA and
that, since nomination was tantamount to election, I might well inform
the audience in my introduction that our lecturer had been accorded
this singular distinction. No opportunity to ask for Webb's approval of
Harry's suggestion occurred before I had to begin the session; but
when I had read the formal introduction I had prepared, I topped it
off by saying that I had it from a source of the highest authority that
Webb would be the next president of the AHA. He looked surprised
when I said this and made no reference to it when he thanked me for
the introduction; but I was not too concerned about his reaction, for he
clearly enjoyed the more than conventional applause that arose as he
took the podium. (If he had suggested to me that the announcement
was inappropriate, I was prepared to blame Harry for it anyway.) I now
have no more than fragmentary impressions of what Webb said during
the Fleming Lectures. Although the LSU Press usually publishes each
series, he did not seek the publication of the series he gave. In one lec-
ture, I clearly recollect, he denounced the Reconstruction imposed on
the South after the Civil War with a vehemence that startled me. He
spoke more like E. Merton Coulter, under whom I had studied the
Civil War at Texas, than the Walter Prescott Webb I had seen before;
but I had not earlier realized the emotional basis of Divzded We Stand. I
remember still more vividly that toward the end of the third lecture at
LSU Webb made an elegiac statement about the personal experience of
living as a child and young man on the margins of the passing frontier.
He was grateful, he said, that he had been born in time to touch the
hem of her garment as she departed.
I learned of Webb's death on the highway between San Antonio and
Austin in 1963 from the newspaper. A few days later I received a letter
from an old friend, Andrew F. Muir, a dedicated historian of the Texas
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989, periodical, 1989; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101212/m1/83/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.