Living History

Dr. Peter B. Levy is a professor of history at York College in York, Pennsylvania. He was born and raised in northern California, where he attended the University of California, Berkeley, and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978. Dr. Levy went on to study at Columbia University in New York City, where he earned both his Master’s degree and his Ph.D. in 1980 and 1986 respectively. He currently lives in Towson, Maryland with his wife. Dr. Levy is a specialist in recent American history. He gives courses on Modern America, Women, Race, and Economic History. Dr. Levy’s publications include: Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland; the Encyclopedia of the Clinton Presidency; Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary on the Modern Civil Rights Movement; The Civil Rights Movement: Guides to Historic Events of the Twentieth Century; The New Left and Labor in the 1960s; and, America in the Sixties - Right, Left, and Center. Currently Dr. Levy is working on a study of natural disasters in America.

Our interview will examine Dr. Levy’s forthcoming work, “Revisiting the Urban Revolts of the 1960s: York, Pennsylvania—A Case Study,” which will appear in The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest: New Perspectives on the Black Freedom Struggle (Florida University Press, 2018).

In this episode, Wesley Phelps interviews former Houston mayor Annise Parker about her life in politics.

Last Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Joyce E. Taylor and Jeffrey Bashir, two of the grandchildren of Samuel Walker Houston.

Born around 1871, Samuel Walker Houston was the son of Joshua and Sylvester Houston, two former slaves who worked for General Sam Houston in Huntsville, Texas. During the 1880s and 90s, Samuel Walker Houston attended the nation's leading black schools, including Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C. At the turn of the century, he returned to Huntsville and founded a training school in the little community of Galilee. Houston's school was one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a well-rounded education that included courses in literature, music, construction, and agriculture. By the time Houston's school merged with the Huntsville Independent School District in 1930, it boasted a dozen teachers and more than 400 students. Based on his remarkable record of achievement, Houston was selected as principal for the new African American high school in Huntsville, which was later named in his honor.

In April 1915, Samuel Walker Houston married Hope G. Harville, one of the teachers at his school. Ms. Harville was a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, the outstanding African American college run by Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama. On August 25, 1917, the Houston family welcomed their second child and first daughter, Helen Hope, into the world. She later attended Wiley College, Talladega College, and graduated from Virginia State University, before enrolling to work for the IRS and teaching as a substitute teacher in New York. She spent the bulk of her career as a supervisor in the Data Processing Department at IBM, but also worked in California for the Naval Supply Center.

Joyce E. Taylor and Jeffrey Bashir are the children of Helen Hope Houston. They both grew up and lived their adult lives in California. Their story is fascinating because it ties the Samuel Walker Houston family to the developments of the post-World War II era, including the Black Power Movement, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers.

Mark W. Lentz is a historian of Latin America who specializes in colonial Mexico and Central America (with a focus on the Maya of Yucatan, Guatemala, and Belize), legal history, and the history of the Atlantic World. His current interests include the role of interpreters and translation in the conquest and colonization of Yucatan, interethnic relations in colonial and early independence Mexico and Guatemala, and grassroots resistance to royal reforms of colonial administration in eighteenth-century Latin America. He recently published articles on indigenous-African relations in eighteenth-century Guatemala and Belize and the role of Jesuits in translation, conversion, and pedagogy in colonial Yucatan. He recently served as program coordinator for the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies (2015). He received his Ph.D. from Tulane University.

Guest host Lyndsey Holloway Hernandez interviews José Raúl García Trejo about his work as a tour guide in Mexico.

In the hands of the state, music is a political tool. The Banda de Musica del Estado de Oaxaca (State Band of Oaxaca, BME), a civil organization nearly as old as the modern state of Oaxaca itself, offers unique insights into the history of a modern political state. In The Inevitable Bandstand, Charles V. Heath examines the BME's role as a part of popular political culture that the state of Oaxaca has deployed in an attempt to bring unity and order to its domain. The BME has always served multiple functions: it arose from musical groups that accompanied military forces as they trained and fought; today it performs at village patron saint days and at Mexico's patriotic celebrations, propagating religions both sacred and civic; it offers education in the ways of liberal democracy to its population, once largely illiterate; and finally, it provides respite from the burdens of life by performing at strictly diversionary functions such as serenades and Sunday matinees. In each of these government-sanctioned roles, the BME serves to unify, educate, and entertain the diverse and fragmented elements within the state of Oaxaca, thereby mirroring the historical trajectory of the state of Oaxaca and the nation of Mexico from the pre-Hispanic and Spanish colonial eras to the nascent Mexican republic, from a militarized and fractured young nation to a consolidated postrevolutionary socialist state, and from a predominantly Catholic entity to an ostensibly secular one.

In this podcast, host Jeffrey L. Littlejohn speaks with historian Zach Doleshal and student Jordan Martinek about their recent public history course, "Recovering New Harmony."

To the immediate east of Huntsville, Texas, just north of Highway 190, lie the remains of Grant’s Colony, aka New Harmony. Named after George Washington Grant, an entrepreneur and landowner in Walker County, the settlement was a rare phenomenon in Reconstruction Era Texas. For it was an attempt by a white southerner of the planter class to implement the promise of racial integration and create a rationalized agricultural community. Entrenched cultural attitudes frustrated Grant’s attempt to recruit white laborers, however, as very few took him up on his offer of employment, housing, and education. Freed slaves, though, came to the settlement in significant numbers and created a vibrant community that lasted until the 1920s. When, after a slow demise, it became part of the Sam Houston National Forest in 1936, the colony's history and even its location were silenced by the past.

From the publisher: Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republic examines a landmark decision in American jurisprudence, the first Supreme Court case to deal with the thorny legal issue of interstate commerce.

Decided in 1824, Gibbons v. Ogden arose out of litigation between owners of rival steamboat lines over passenger and freight routes between the neighboring states of New York and New Jersey. But what began as a local dispute over the right to ferry the paying public from the New Jersey shore to New York City soon found its way into John Marshall’s court and constitutional history. The case is consistently ranked as one of the twenty most significant Supreme Court decisions and is still taught in constitutional law courses, cited in state and federal cases, and quoted in articles on constitutional, business, and technological history.

Gibbons v. Ogden initially attracted enormous public attention because it involved the development of a new and sensational form of technology. To early Americans, steamboats were floating symbols of progress—cheaper and quicker transportation that could bring goods to market and refinement to the backcountry. A product of the rough-and-tumble world of nascent capitalism and legal innovation, the case became a landmark decision that established the supremacy of federal regulation of interstate trade, curtailed states’ rights, and promoted a national market economy. The case has been invoked by prohibitionists, New Dealers, civil rights activists, and social conservatives alike in debates over federal regulation of issues ranging from labor standards to gun control. This lively study fills in the social and political context in which the case was decided—the colorful and fascinating personalities, the entrepreneurial spirit of the early republic, and the technological breakthroughs that brought modernity to the masses.

James S. Olson is a Distinguished Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. He has written widely on a diverse set of topics, including popular culture, immigration to the United States, and the history of cancer. He also has a special interest in Vietnam and has edited the Dictionary of the Vietnam War (1988) and written The Vietnam War: Handbook of the Literature and Research (1993) and with Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam. Olson is the author of many other books and articles, including The Ethnic Dimension in American History, Second Edition; Saving Capitalism; Bathsheba's Breast; and with Randy Roberts, John Wayne: American.