Word: americans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...neighboring towns of Ganado and Edna near Houston. Purpose: to teach 400 words of basic English to 42 five-year-olds, all of whom spoke Spanish only. After 3½ months the "graduates" entered first grade in the town's public schools-where more than half the Mexican-American first-graders had failed the year before-and all passed with flying colors...
...Walter Webb, raised in the alkali flats of West Texas, schooled in the saddle, and for 40 years a professor at the University of Texas, is also his generation's foremost philosopher of the frontier, and the leading historian (The Great Plains, The Texas Rangers) of the American West. At 71, he has been made the hero of a sort of plainsman's festival of letters-a collection of his occasional essays (An Honest Preface; Houghton Mifflin; $3.75), trimmed with the personal tributes of his Texas friends. Says his old friend and cultural sparring partner, J. Frank Dobie...
Have Gun, Can Travel. In his inaugural address as president of the American Historical Association, included in An Honest Preface, Webb admits that "I am one of the few persons who did not have to leave home to get a job. I am an example of institutional inbreeding which frightens all universities except the two that practice it most. Harvard and Oxford...
...historian of the plains, Webb follows in the tradition of the great Frederick Jackson Turner, who first formulated the frontier theory of U.S. history in 1893: "The existence of an area of free land and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development." To write his history of the Texas Rangers, says Webb, "Like Parkman I went to all the places where things had happened," and finally "I stumbled on one of the few original ideas I ever had." The idea: "What I saw was that when Stephen F. Austin brought his colonists to Texas, he brought them...
...that flash of insight, says Webb, "I sensed that something very important happened when the American people emerged from the woodland, and the revolver [was] an adaptation to the needs of the new situation...