Articles

Yes! In 2010 we completed the restoration of the Byrne-Reed House, our physical home in Texas’s capital city. Now, as we launch this website, we welcome you to our new home online.

Powerful, interactive, and visually compelling, the website offers visitors a far richer and more exciting experience than our previous site. Its expanded capacity and enhanced search capability will dramatically extend the reach of our programming by allowing us to share resources easily across time and space.

• View distinguished scholars’ lectures from our teacher institutes: Charles Flanagan on the Constitution, Gordon S. Wood on the early American Republic, H. W. Brands on the Gilded Age, David Kennedy on U.S. strategy in World War II, and J. Dennis Huston on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

• Explore the extraordinary treasures within our digital repository, including facsimiles of historical documents, photographs, and works of art.

• Download recent Humanities Texas publications, such as The Making of Modern America, our 2012 summer teacher institute’s publication.

• Use the interactive map of events to find exhibitions, public lectures, grant-funded programs, and other humanities-related events in your area.

• Submit your organization’s upcoming events for posting on the “Humanities around Texas” feature on our homepage.

Of course, the site also includes all the materials necessary to apply for a Humanities Texas grant, rent one of our traveling exhibitions, reserve the Byrne-Reed House for a special event, and nominate a Texas teacher for an Outstanding Teaching Award.

We are inaugurating two new programs to coincide with the launch of the website. Texas Originals, a radio feature produced in collaboration with KUHF Houston Public Radio, will begin airing on Saturday, February 4th on KUHF. The program will profile significant Texans in history, literature, art, and other fields of endeavor. The website will contain additional information on each featured individual. This program will be available to other public radio and commercial stations in the state. The episodes featuring Tom Lea and Dorothy Scarborough are currently available online; future episodes will become available as soon as they have aired on KUHF.

The educational poster series A President’s Vision examines the aspirations of significant U.S. presidencies and initiatives that advanced each man’s vision. The program provides teachers and students with a wealth of historical materials and instructional resources, helping students see each presidency within the broader context of U.S. history. Digital versions of the posters, as well as a wide range of supplemental materials, are available on our new site today.

Please take time to explore the new website and give us your feedback, which will enable us to refine what will be a very organic initiative. I hope you will share my appreciation of the fine work done by Kevin Osborn of Research & Design, Ltd., who designed the site, and Tyler Ham of Thamtech, who programmed it. Like all major Humanities Texas endeavors, the entire staff has been involved in creating and populating the new website, but Melissa Huber, Eric Lupfer, and Samantha Gordon deserve special recognition for their dedicated work on the project.

The Humanities Texas staff on the front steps of the Byrne-Reed House.
Reed family and friends on the front steps of the Byrne-Reed House. Courtesy of the Reed family.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood speaks in El Paso at "The Shaping of the American Republic to 1877," one of our 2010 summer teacher institutes.
Texas Originals, a radio program produced in collaboration with KUHF Houston Public Radio, will begin airing on Saturday, February 4th on KUHF.