By Benjamin Johnson, SMU Associate Professor of History
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-927024.mp3
Dallas, TX –
One professor in Wisconsin called him probably the single most important scholar of Spanish borderland history in North America in the second half of the 20th century. Friends, family and colleagues will gather later today in Dallas for a memorial service for writer and SMU history professor David J. Weber. Weber died last month in New Mexico at age 69. Benjamin Johnson teaches history at SMU. He looks back on the importance of Weber's work.
News of David J. Weber's death in August spread by word of mouth, email, list-serves, and in the pages of such newspapers as the Dallas Morning News and New York Times.
Very few of those who get this kind of attention in death are professors of history, which is what David was.
One exception was Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner, whose career began in the 1890s, was the author of the so-called "frontier thesis" - the argument that America was different than Europe because of its frontier. The frontier made us a nation with more economic opportunity, greater individual freedom. Pioneers were forced to rely on themselves and their neighbors, so they had little patience for pomp, ceremony, or hierarchy. Self-made men like Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln were their heroes, not kings and queens. It was the West, Turner told us, that gave us our raucous democracy, our can-do spirit, that melted scores of European groups into one American people.
David Weber also wrote and taught about the American West, for the last 34 years here in Dallas at SMU. But his West was different than Turner's. David studied what we historians call the "borderlands" - the huge territory at the North end of the Spanish domain in the New World that later became the U.S.-Mexico border region.
David's pioneers were also Spanish and Mexican, not just Anglo. Indians were all but invisible to Turner, but for Weber they were major characters, whether the settled Pueblos or the wide-ranging Apache and Comanche. Turner told us a flattering story about ourselves; David's was more somber. In his stories, Europeans and Americans brutalized Indians and attempted to destroy their religions and replace them with their own. David was no polemicist, but he insisted that his readers reckon with the fact that when Americans took the Southwest from Mexico, they brought dispossession and racial chauvinism as well as their electoral democracy and vibrant economy.
Frederick Jackson Turner was famous for most of his career, a household name in educated circles. Despite his enormous gifts and sterling reputation within the community of professional historians, David Weber spent most of his career in relative obscurity.
This changed in the last decade, however. The Spanish crown knighted him, and Mexico's government awarded him the Aguila Azteca, the highest honor that it bestows upon foreign nationals. He was invited to spend a year at Harvard, and then at Yale. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, perhaps our most prestigious humanities honor.
David gained these honors and attention not just because he was a fine scholar and writer, but also because current events made it clear how much the stories that he told mattered. The edge of America is not a frontier between us and emptiness; it is a border between us and Mexico. Race is not just a question of black and white, but also of brown and red. Spanish San Antonio and Santa Fe are as much antecedents to an America that will soon be one-fourth Hispanic as are Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.
Even among historically conscious Americans, David Weber will never be a household name. But maybe he should be.
Benjamin Johnson teaches history at SMU in Dallas. The memorial service for David J. Weber begins at one in the grand ballroom of SMU's Umphrey Lee Center in Dallas. You can read more about David J. Weber at http://smu.edu/swcenter/Tribute.htm.
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