Walter Prescott Webb (April 3, 1888, in Panola County, Texas – March 8, 1963, near Austin, Texas) was an American historian noted for his groundbreaking work on the American West. As president of the Texas State Historical Association, he launched the project that produced the Handbook of Texas. He is a member of the Hall of Great Westerners, which is a part of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
Early life
Walter Prescott Webb was born on April 3, 1888, in rural Panola County, Texas, to Casner P. and Elizabeth (Kyle) Webb. His father worked a farm part-time while teaching school. When Webb was a teenager, the family moved west to the arid western Cross Timbers region traversing Stephens County and Eastland County, Texas. He helped with the family farming business and attended Ranger High School.
The Webbs moved frequently to different tenant farms within the region. According to Webb, these experiences at the edge of the western plains of Texas influenced his early writing. Casner started by accepting teaching assignments and farm leases in Stephens County, but first moved to adjacent Eastland County 1898. Webb enrolled at various rural schools and was certified as a teacher in 1907.
Webb started attending the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1909. In 1913, Webb graduated with a baccalaureate degree. Over the next few years, he taught at three high schools and at the Texas State Teachers College.
Career
Webb worked as a bookkeeper in San Marcos and as an optometrist's assistant in San Antonio. Then, in 1918, he was invited to join the history faculty at the University of Texas. He wrote his Master of Arts thesis on the Texas Rangers in 1920 and was encouraged to pursue his PhD. After a year of study at the University of Chicago, he returned to Austin, where he began a historical work on the West. The result of this work was The Great Plains, published in 1931, hailed as great breakthrough in the interpretation of the history of the region, and declared the outstanding contribution to American history since World War I by the Social Science Research Council in 1939. He was awarded his PhD for his work on The Great Plains in 1932, the year after its publication. The Texas Rangers (1935) was considered the definitive study of the legendary Texas Rangers and its Captain Bill McDonald.
Webb published Divided We Stand: The Crisis of a Frontierless Democracy in 1937. In the following years, Webb accepted two teaching positions in England. The University of London appointed him as the Harkness Professor of American History. After the United States dispatched troops to Europe, Webb moved to Oxford to accept a chair at the university as its Harmsworth Professor of American History.
In 1939–1946 he served as president of the Texas State Historical Association. During his tenure as president, he launched a project to produce an encyclopedia of Texas, which was subsequently published in 1952 as the Handbook of Texas.
After returning from England in 1944, Webb joined in a political dispute, which pitted several University of Texas faculty against the University of Texas Board of Regents. The board fired some economics professors for their support of New Deal policies. The sitting University of Texas president, Homer P. Raimey, defended the fired professors on the grounds of economic freedom. In response, the board fired Raimey. Webb was a spokesperson for the faculty opposed to the new president, T.S. Painter. One result of this advocacy was a strain of Webb's relationship with the former chair of the history department, Eugene C. Barker, who had also influenced Webb as a historian.
Webb served as president of the Mississippi Historical Association and the American Historical Association. He was a co-founder of the Texas Institute of Letters and a member of the Philosophical Society of Texas.
Personal life
Webb married Jane Elizabeth Oliphant of Austin on September 16, 1916. Their only child, Mildred Alice Webb, was born on July 30, 1918. Webb's father-in-law was the Confederate States Army veteran and Austin, Texas-based photographer, William J. Oliphant (1845–1930). Walter and Jane remained married until her death in 1960.
Webb purchased a 360-acre tract in Hays County, Texas, not far from Austin. He rehabilitated an old stone house which was located near a topological feature, and called his second home, "Friday Mountain Ranch." Webb hosted many get togethers at his ranch, attracting Texas literatis such as Frank Wardlaw, John Henry Faulk, Roy Bedichek, Mody Boatright, and J. Frank Dobie.