Historical scholarship today, in print and electronic: my work on Hatton Sumners

I have been working on the subject of Hatton W. Sumners, who was a Congressman from Dallas for almost four decades of the first half of the 20th century, including archival work in his papers at the Dallas Historical Society and in the National Archives, for about half a dozen years. Last year ago I published a short piece about Sumners' role in the resolution of the 1937 court-packing crisis in NOT EVEN PAST, the blog of the History Department of the University of Texas at Austin. My article is here:  https://notevenpast.org/hatton-sumners-and-the-retirement-of-supreme-court-justices/.

NOT EVEN PAST (https://notevenpast.org/) is a pioneering, award-winning blog that significantly connects UT Austin's History Department to the world. It features cutting-edge research, interviews, and thought-provoking essays and short articles (and podcasts) that demonstrate the broad ambit of historical research, writing, and teaching today.

I discovered recently that my online piece has crossed over into the print world of legal and legal-historical literature. I found that Louis Fisher, Scholar in Residence at the Constitution Project and author of at least fifteen books, cited my NOT EVEN PAST article in a footnote of his newest law-journal article:

I hope this small event illustrates the possibilities for a cross-pollination between historical work presented in print and that presented online.

Meanwhile, I am continuing my work on the Congressman, and, there being only abbreviated information about his life available in libraries and on the internet, I have begun to write a real biography of him in order to fill that gap in the historical literature.