Eugene C. Barker - Other Scholarly Efforts

Other Scholarly Efforts

After his book on Austin, Barker published in 1928 Mexico and Texas 1821-1835) and in 1929, Readings in Texas History. He and Miss Amelia Williams undertook the collection of the Sam Houston papers, which were published in eight volumes between 1938 and 1943, under the title The Writings of Sam Houston. From 1927 to 1932, he was active in the short-lived East Texas Historical Association, reborn in 1962 and based on the campus of Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches.

Barker served as managing editor from 1910 to 1937 of The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, published by the Texas State Historical Association. He not only edited the magazine but contributed many of the articles. He showed how Texas impacted national development and westward expansion. He repudiated those who claimed that the westward expansion of the United States, the acquisition of Texas, and the Mexican Cession of 1848, were the results of a conspiracy of southerners to expand slave territory. He also rejected those who claimed that the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War were caused primarily by Mexico.

Barker was also responsible for the University of Texas library becoming a repository of authentic sources on the American Civil War. Much of those works were possible from the George W. Littlefield Fund, an initial $125,000 donation from the legendary Texas cattleman and banker, who sought to tell the "Southern" side of history. UT hence also became a major repository of the history of the American South.

Barker wrote textbooks used from third grade to high school. In 1912, Barker, C.W. Ramsdell and C.S. Potts published A School History of Texas, the state-adopted text for many years. Among his associates in writing the school textbooks were Henry Steele Commager, who later became an academic critic of U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin; William E. Dodd, later U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambassador to Nazi Germany; and Walter Prescott Webb, an East Texas native who had studied western history under Barker. As department chairman, Barker concentrated on making the UT history department second to none in its field nationally. He encouraged scholars to work in one another’s fields as their research interests so led them. He disdained any scholar claiming virtual "ownership" of a particular field of study.