The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 99, July 1995 - April, 1996 Page: 278
626 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
These interviews may have been conducted by schoolchildren, but future biogra-
phers of Foote, Maverick, Marcus, Paul Baker, and others will neglect these
products of child research at their peril.
The best remembrances of childhood in this work capture something of the
immediacy and vividness-even the terror-of the child's world, a world very dif-
ferent from the present, especially in rural Texas. Strangely, recollections of
weather events dominate several accounts. The remarkable Chism tells of North
Texas tornadoes that sucked buckets from wells and "blowed the sow up on a
tree and scalded the hair off her." Foote recalls Gulf hurricanes that struck his
native Wharton and "enormous floods" that were "almost as much fun as a hurri-
cane to a child." Baker remembers getting lost in terrible West Texas wind and
sandstorms on his family's ranch near Hereford, and that "When the first frost
came, you looked out the window and saw the whole countryside moving toward
you, these tumbleweeds rolling toward you."
One lesson of Flynn and Russell's modest book may be that Texas historians
have missed a bet by leaving the study of childhood to other scholars, chiefly
sociologists and folklorists. After reading this work, interested persons may go
on to the most detailed account of a Texas childhood yet in print, Dorothy
Howard's Dorothy's World: Childhood in Sabine Bottom, 190o2-1ro (Prentice-Hall,
1977).
Austin THAD SITTON
Essays on the Changing Images of the Southwest. Edited by Richard Francaviglia.
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Pp. x+153. ISBN o-
89096-620-6. $24.50.)
Walter P. Webb would have been fascinated by this book, the twenty-eighth
collection of essays in his honor sponsored by the University of Texas at
Arlington. All of the essays deal with the cultural geographies of the Southwest.
For the essayists the Southwest is an elusive term, however. David Weber tips us
off in his introduction as he describes how the British novelist J. B. Priestly and
his wife, the famous archeologist Jacquette Hawkes, found two different
Southwests of the imagination.
There are five essays on this subject in the book. Richard Francaviglia sees the
Southwest as an "elusive land," a "shifting region" that ultimately in his imagina-
tion includes northern Mexico. His essay has breathtaking sweep. It includes a
discussion of Mexican cartography up through Alexander von Humboldt's first
"scientific" map of New Spain in 1811. These maps signified imperial ownership
and control by Spain. They were replaced by American maps after the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which shifted the burden of imperialism to the
United States. In discussing the 1848-186o period of mapping in the Southwest,
Francaviglia unfortunately skims over the extensive literature on the subject,
mentioning only the Emory-Bartlett aspect of the U.S.-Mexican Boundary Survey
and R. H. Kern's views made on Lt. J. H. Simpson's expedition of 1849.
Francaviglia does spend time on the Santa Fe Railroad and its further creation278
October
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 99, July 1995 - April, 1996, periodical, 1996; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101217/m1/326/: accessed March 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.