Rondel V. Davidson Endowed Lecture Series

The Lecture Series was established in 1989 in memory of Dr. Rondel V. Davidson, specialist in European intellectual history and former Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Philosophy at Pan American University. Professor Davidson published, Did We Think Victory Great? The Life and Ideas of Victor Considerant, in 1988.

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Borderlands Research in Spanish, Mexican, and Texas Archives

Armando C. Alonzo

Dr. Armando Alonzo will speak to UTRGV students in Dr. Jamie Starling’s HIST 6325: Seminar in Borderlands History course as well as students from HIST 3300, HIST 3333, and HIST 4399. Interested faculty are also invited to attend. Dr. Alonzo’s presentation will focus on researching the South Texas Borderlands in Spanish, Mexican, and Texas archives as well as the challenges of studying the region’s earlier Spanish colonial era and Native American history. A native of the Rio Grande Valley, Dr. Alonzo received his M.A. degree in history in 1983 from what was then the University of Texas – Pan American, where he wrote his thesis on “A History of the Mexicans in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas: Their Role in Land Development and Commercial Agriculture, 1900-1930.” Dr. Alonzo earned a Ph.D. in History from Indiana University in 1991 with a dissertation that focused on “Tejano Rancheros and Changes in Land Tenure, Hidalgo County, Texas, 1850-1900.” His book, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734-1900 was published by University of New Mexico Press in 1998. The author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and scholarly conference presentations, Dr. Alonzo is currently researching a transnational history of Texas and Northern Mexico between 1700 and 1865.
Crossing the line: Mexican children making the border 1900-1930

Yolanda Chavez Leyva

Dr. Yolanda Chávez Leyva is a Chicana/ fronteriza historian and writer who was born and raised on the border. She is of Rarámuri descent and honors her grandmother Canuta Ruacho. She is the Director of the Institute of Oral History and Associate Professor in the Department of History at UTEP. She is also the lead historian for the first-ever Bracero Museum (funded by the Mellon Foundation) slated to open in Socorro, Texas in 2024. She has spent her life listening to and now documenting the lives of people who live on la frontera. Professor Leyva specializes in border history, public history, and Chicana history. She is co-founder of Museo Urbano, a museum of the streets that highlights fronterize history by taking it where people are-- from museums to the actual streets of El Paso. She came to academia after a decade of social work in the Black and Brown communities of east Austin, with a desire to make academia and especially history relevant and useful to people. She is the recipient of the National Council on Public History "Best Public History Project Award" and the American Historical Association Herbert Feis Award that recognizes "distinguished contributions to public history." She has curated, and co-curated, many museums exhibits with her students.
Sick from Freedom: The Untold Story of a Smallpox Epidemic Among Formerly Enslaved People

Jim Downs

Emancipated from slavery, former bondspeople entered into an environment in which more soldiers died from disease than from battle. This talk explores the high rate of illness and mortality that devastated formerly enslaved people during the Civil War and Reconstruction. In particular, it provides the first analysis of the smallpox epidemic that began in Washington, DC in 1862 and then spread to the Lower South in 1863 and Mississippi Valley in 1864-65. By 1865, the epidemic plagued the entire South and began to move west and infected Native Americans on reservations. Due to the unexpected and inordinate mortality, the federal government in an unprecedented move established the first-ever system of national health care in the South--establishing over 40 hospitals, employing over 120 physicians and treating well-over one million freedpeople.

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History. He is the author of Sick From Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2012), Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016) and Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (Harvard UP, 2021) which has been translated into Chinese, French, Korean, Japanese, and Russian.
An Unhealthy Obsession: Understanding Russian Views of Ukraine

Faith Hillis

Faith Hillis is Professor of Russian History at the University of Chicago. She is particularly interested in nineteenth and twentieth century politics, culture, and ideas. She is the author of Children of Rus’: Right Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Cornell, 2013) and Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Exiles and the Quest for Freedom, 1830 1930 (Oxford, 2021). The latter work was awarded the 2022 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize from ASEEES, which recognizes the most important contribution in any discipline of Slavic studies. The recipient of research fellowships at Columbia, Harvard, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, her research has been funded by ACLS, IREX, Fulbright Hays, and the NEH, among others.

What is behind Russia’s apparent obsession with Ukraine? This talk explores why Russians see Ukraine as an integral part of their territory and history, on the one hand, and as an existential and irreconcilable threat, on the other. Showing that this contradictory mode of thinking is not merely a function of current events, but is deeply rooted in history, it argues that altering this mindset will prove necessary to restore peace to Ukraine.

Rondel Davidson Endowed Lecture
The Scramble for Africa and the Conquest of the Congo

Adam Hochchild

Adam Hochschild writes frequently about issues of human rights and social justice. The latest of his eleven books is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, which won the Gold Medal for Nonfiction of the 2023 California Book Awards. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion. 1914-1918. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Award. Hochschild has also written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Nation, and many other magazines, and teaches at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

Adam Hochschild

Book Talk

In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild reassesses the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor. American Midnight brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country showing how their struggles still guide us today.
Gender, Slavery, and the Archives in the Caribbean

Marisa J. Fuentes

Rutgers University Professor Marisa Fuentes, an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, will deliver a live virtual presentation on "Gender, Slavery, and the Archive" as part of the Rondel Davidson Endowed Lecture Series.

Fuentes’ scholarship brings together critical historiography, historical geography, and black feminist theory to examine gender, sexuality, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic World.
Gender, Slavery, and the Archives in the Caribbean with American Sign Language

Marisa J. Fuentes

Rutgers University Professor Marisa Fuentes, an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, will deliver a live virtual presentation on "Gender, Slavery, and the Archive" as part of the Rondel Davidson Endowed Lecture Series.

Fuentes’ scholarship brings together critical historiography, historical geography, and black feminist theory to examine gender, sexuality, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic World.
Remembering Conquest in Texas

Omar Valerio-Jimenez

This presentation draws from Dr. Valerio-Jimenez's larger project, Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship, which explores the influence of collective memories of the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-48) on struggles for social change among Mexican Americans. It examines the collective memories disseminated among ethnic Mexicans through families, publications, and organizations. These memories offered alternative views of the war that not only challenged the dominant versions, but were invoked by Mexican Americans to remind the nation of the war's continuing legacies. The war instigated immediate intergroup conflict between European Americans and ethnic Mexicans that bore long-term effects by shaping the ways that the latter remembered the aggression and the promises of equality in the treaty that ended the war. The failure of the U.S. government to enforce the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo led to some of these legacies, namely the consequences of Mexican Americans' status as second-class citizens. "Remembering Conquest in Texas" explores how various groups in the state held different war memories, and examines the multiple ways in which these memories of the war and its aftermath inspired Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations.
Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle between Liberalism and Conservatism

Nancy Beck Young

Professor Nancy Beck Young, professor of history at the University of Houston, presents her talk “Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle between Liberalism and Conservatism”.
La Malinche according to the Indians

Camilla A. Townsend

La Malinche has long been cast as a traitor to her people in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. More recently we have been reminded that her life was hard and her choices few, and that she owed no loyalty to the Aztecs, who were her people’s enemy. It is more than time that we translate and analyze the Nahuatl-language comments made by Indians and for Indians in the 1500s. What did they think of la Malinche?

Rondel Davidson Endowed Lecture given by Dr. Camilla D. Townsend, Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers.
The Failure of Interwar Democracy and Current Implications

Christopher Browning

From the AP website: "EDINBURG — A renowned Holocaust scholar, Christopher Browning was on-hand Thursday at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley campus as part of the UTRGV Rondel Davidson Lecture Series..."

Abstract of lecture:

Allied victory in World War I was proclaimed as making the world safe for democracy, yet the interwar period witnessed widespread democratic failure. Most important, democratic failure in Italy and Germany resulted in fascist dictatorships, war, and--in the case of Nazi Germany--genocide. In 1989, as earlier in 1919, democracy seemed triumphant, but in many countries democracy is now in retreat. What insights does the widespread democratic failure of the interwar period offer to better understand the current crisis of democracy?
The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I

Lynne Dumenil

From the book publisher, "In tracing the rise of the modern idea of the American “new woman,” Lynn Dumenil examines World War I’s surprising impact on women and, in turn, women’s impact on the war. Telling the stories of a diverse group of women, including African Americans, dissidents, pacifists, reformers, and industrial workers, Dumenil analyzes both the roadblocks and opportunities they faced...Dumenil shows how women activists staked their claim to loyal citizenship by framing their war work as homefront volunteers, overseas nurses, factory laborers, and support personnel as “the second line of defense...”

Rondel Davidson Endowed Lecture by Lynn Dumenil, who is the Robert Glass Cleland Professor Emerita of American History at Occidental College. She specializes in U.S. cultural and social history since the Civil War.
Muhammad Ali and the rise of professional sports in 1960s Houston

Frank Guridy

The Department of History at UTPA along with the Rondel Davison Endowed Lecture Series invited guest speaker Frank Guridy to present a lecture on Muhammad Ali and the rise of professional sports such as boxing, baseball and football in 1960s Houston at the Engineering Building Auditorium November 3. Reported by Naja Wade.
Tippecanoe: Tecumseh's Turning Point

R. David Edmunds

Dr. R. David Edmunds, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas, speaks at the annual Rondel V. Davidson Endowment lecture sponsored by the Endowment and the University of Texas-Pan American History Program. The lecture was given on February 23, 2012 at the UTPA Library Auditorium, in Edinburg, Texas.