DR. NORMAN D. BROWN: A GRAD STUDENT’S APPRECIATION AFTER FOUR DECADES
Norman D. Brown (1936-2015; Ph.D., history, UNC; Professor of History in the Department of History, University of Texas at Austin for 48 years) was my mentor as a graduate student in the History Department of the
University of Texas at Austin from 1973 to 1975. While I then moved on to the
University’s law school, without finishing my M.A. thesis, I stayed in touch
with Norman. He inspired me to continue to pursue history . . . and to complete my thesis, which I did, finally, in 1986, on the topic of Governor Dan Moody’s
legislative program in the late twenties, which figures into the story his final scholarship tells.
During my time in the History Department, I saw Norman from two vantage points. First, I graded
papers for his "Old South" and "New South" classes. Norman was an exemplary teacher
of undergraduates, low key, well organized, and plain spoken. I recall students
saying, “He makes it so easy to take notes!” He required them to write papers
and to answer essay questions in exams so as to demonstrate that s/he had read
the material, had listened to his lectures, and could logically put facts
together with broad themes—a valuable skill for their lifetimes.
Second,
in a graduate seminar, “Texas in the 1920s and 1930s,” I learned from him the
fundamental role of archival research in the historical enterprise. Norman wanted us to dig, as deeply as
we could in a semester, into the raw, source materials from which to build and
argue claims about topics such as the “Red River Bridge War” between Texas and
Oklahoma in 1931, the non-sequential and corrupt administrations of Governor
Miriam A. Ferguson, and, for me, Governor Moody. Two of his insistent points
were: first, that the archival correspondence of relevant actors furnishes insights
about what was really happening; and, second that political history requires also
pertinent social, cultural, economic, and other considerations. At semester’s
end, Norman presided over the students’ critiquing of each other’s work; his
probings fostered the most rewarding historical dialogs in which I’ve ever participated.
Norman
was not the only excellent professor I encountered in the History Department of the University of Texas at Austin.
But he was my mentor during key years of my life, and, while I did not become a
professional historian, his splendid teaching undergirded my four decades of
law practice and today inspires me in retirement as I try to pick up with
history where I left off in 1975.