Daniel Edmond Kilgore was born eight miles north of downtown Dallas on May 16, 1921. He inherited a dedication to hard work and learning from his parents, and his self-discipline was reinforced by his experiences as a youngster during the Depression. His life was also affected by polio, which he contracted when he was eighteen months old.

Dan attended Dallas public schools and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1939. He received his B.B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1943 and returned for another year (1943–1944) to take advanced accounting courses.

In the fall of 1946, Dan moved to Corpus Christi, where he worked as a highly respected Certified Public Accountant until his retirement in 1986. In 1956, he married Carol Isensee of Clarkwood, a small community near Corpus Christi. They resided in Clarkwood, where they raised their three children.

In 1947, Dan began collecting books on Corpus Christi and Texas history while also pursuing history as an avocation. He became a founding member of both the Nueces County Historical Society and the Nueces County Historical Commission and was involved in many other groups dedicated to the local past. Early in his career as a collector, he joined the Texas State Historical Association and began attending its annual Texana auction. He formed friendships with Texana dealer William Morrison, Sr., and over the years cultivated relationships with many other sellers of Texas and Western books.

Dan became renowned as a Texas book collector, known for his meticulous eye for rare items at reasonable prices. His home library, lined with his carefully assembled collection, served as both a refuge and a creative outlet.

In 1976–1977, Dan served as president of the Texas State Historical Association. Upon his election, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly described him as “a demon collector.” Colleen Kain, who worked closely with him during his term, noted that he elevated the annual Texana auction by encouraging members of the book trade to donate significant items. As a result of his efforts, auction proceeds in 1977 more than tripled over the previous year, setting a precedent for future events.

A dedicated scholar, Dan not only collected Texas history literature but also contributed to it, authoring books, articles, and reviews. His works include A Ranger Legacy: 150 Years of Service to Texas (Madrona Press, Inc., 1973); How Did Davy Die? (Texas A&M University Press, 1978), which originated as his 1977 TSHA presidential address; “Two Sixshooters and a Sunbonnet: The Story of Sally Skull” (Texas Folklore Society, Number XLIII); “Corpus Christi: A Quarter Century of Development, 1900–1925,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly (April 1972); and “Texas Cattle Origins,” The Cattleman (January 1983). Through his writings and presentations, he helped Corpus Christi residents better understand their city’s past. He was a member of the Philosophical Society of Texas and an honorary member of the Former Texas Rangers Association.

In 1984, Dan transferred his collection to Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi (then Corpus Christi State University). By that time, it included approximately eight thousand volumes and around forty-five cubic feet of manuscript materials related to local history. The Kilgore Collection became a centerpiece of the university’s Special Collections & Archives Department. Dan remained closely connected to the collection, continuing to donate materials and serving as Texana bibliographer ex officio until his death in 1995. He was always willing to share his extensive knowledge of Texas and local history.

Dan Kilgore was a practical man of conservative principles and regular habits. He bore his physical disabilities with stoicism and was known for his civility, thoughtful speech, and quiet wit. The Texas State Historical Association recognized his many contributions by inducting him as a Fellow in 1991, an honor he greatly treasured.

Photo courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Mary and Jeff Bell Library, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Seymour Vaughan “Ike” Connor, born on March 4, 1923, in Paris, Texas, worked as an archivist at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum and the Texas State Archives and was the first director of the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University. His published work includes an edited three-volume Texas Treasury Papers; Letters Received in the Treasury Department of the Republic of Texas, 1836–1846 (1955); The Peters Colony of Texas (1959); The West Is for Us: The Reminiscences of Mary A. Blankenship (1958); Builders of the Southwest (1959); A Biggers Chronicle (1961); Texas: A History (1971); with Odie B. Faulk, North America Divided: The Mexican War, 1846–1848 (1971);  Broadcloth and Britches: The Santa Fe Trade (1977) with Jimmy M. Skaggs; and  numerous articles in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. The Texas Institute of Letters inducted him as a member in 1977. Connor retired from Texas Tech in 1979. At the age of seventy-eight, Seymour “Ike” Connor died in Lubbock on March 23, 2001.

[Excerpt from the Seymour Vaughan Connor Handbook of Texas entry.]

Watson C. Arnold has seen several incarnations of his career.  A physician by training, he was the director of pediatric nephrology, dialysis, and transplantation at Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth for twenty years.  During that time, he earned a certificate in ranch management and a Ph.D. in history from TCU.  Arnold has taught in the pediatrics department of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and he has also taught in the history departments of TCU and Baylor.  He served as president of the Texas State Historical Association from 2012-2013, and became a Fellow of the association in 2024.

Dr. Andrew C. Baker is an associate professor of history at A&M-Commerce, where he teaches courses in modern United States history, environmental history, and public history. His book, Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South (2018), explores the history of suburban sprawl and farmland preservation in Texas and Virginia. He has published award-winning articles in Agricultural History, Environmental History, and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He is currently working on several projects including a commodity history of arsenic, place-based histories of environmental justice activism in Texas, and an interdisciplinary history of ruins.

Ava Purkiss is an assistant professor in American Culture at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin and has held fellowships at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, the American Association of University Women, and the Mary M. Highes Research Fellowship in Texas History. Purkiss is the writer of Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise, 1900-1960, recipient of the 2017 Organization of American Historians Lerner-Scott Prize and the 2018 Letitia Woods Brown prize for best article in African American women’s history from the Association of Black Women Historians.

A native of South Texas, Thomas H. Kreneck earned a B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of Houston and a Ph.D. in history from Bowling Green State University. From 1976-1990, he served as an archivist historian at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center (HMRC), which documented the development of the Houston urban region. During the last ten years with HMRC he was its assistant head. Notably, he founded and developed HMRC’s Mexican American archival component and helped HMRC to launch The Houston Review: History and Culture of the Gulf Coast. He also taught history as adjunct instructor at Houston-area colleges and universities.

From 1990–2012, Kreneck directed Special Collections & Archives within the library at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. There he administered the university's rare Texana books as well as its manuscripts dealing with Corpus Christi and its environs. He maintained a focus on gathering Mexican American research materials. He was also the Joe B. Frantz Lecturer in Public History for the university’s history program. Kreneck served as chair of the campus committee at A&M-Corpus Christi delegated to erect the statue of the civil rights leader Dr. Hector P. García. After leaving A&M-Corpus Christi, Kreneck remained active in historical and other public educational endeavors.

An author of articles, book chapters, and books, Dr. Kreneck is most recognized in Texana circles for co-editing with Gerald D. Saxon Collecting Texas: Essays on Texana Collectors and the Creation of Research Libraries (Dallas: The Book Club of Texas, 2010). He has been chosen three times as a Featured Author at the Texas Book Festival in Austin. In 2015, he received the Premio Estrella de Aztlán from the Texas Foco of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, a lifetime achievement award for fostering the well-being of the Mexican American community.

Dr. Heather Green Wooten is a prominent Texas medical historian, Wooten previously served on the faculty of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB-Galveston) where she taught courses in medical history and medical ethics.   She has authored or co-authored four books related to epidemics and medical care in Texas.  Her first book, The Polio Years in Texas:  Battling a Terrifying Unknown (2010) was a recipient of the TSHA Mary M. Hughes Research Fellowship, the T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award, and the Ottis Lock Endowment awarded by the East Texas Historical Association.  Publications also include Old Red:  Pioneering Medical Education in Texas (2012) for the TSHA Fred Rider Cotten Popular History Series; and Skilled Hands: Surgery at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston (2016), co-authored with William Henry Kellar.  Wooten also serves as Project Director for the Handbook of Texas Medicine, the first online encyclopedia in the nation devoted to the history of medicine.  She is an active member of regional and state historical organizations, including service on the TSHA Board of Directors, as Executive Director of TSHA (2020-2022), and is a past president of the East Texas Historical Association.  She was elected an ETHA Fellow in 2019.  A native of West Texas, Wooten received her Ph.D. in the Medical Humanities from UTMB-Galveston in 2006.  She currently resides in Kemah with her husband, Kevin and beloved Labrador, Lily.

Detroit, Michigan, native Bernadette Pruitt is associate professor of history and has been a member of the Department of History since 1996. She teaches classes on race and ethnicity, internal migrations, slavery, Recent United States history, and the African Diaspora. The first Black woman to earn a PhD in History from the University of Houston, she obtained her undergraduate and master’s degrees from HBCU Texas Southern University. The teacher-mentor is also an accomplished scholar. Her monograph, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900-1941 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), examines Black internal migration and community building in what ultimately becomes the fourth largest city in the United States. Pruitt’s book is one of the first scholarly attempts to address the Great Migrations within the South. The scholar has won several awards, including the 2014 Ottis Lock Superb Book Award with the East Texas Historical Association (ETHA). She is also the past recipient of other awards and fellowships including the University of Illinois at Chicago African American Studies Department postdoctoral fellowship, Huggins-Quarles Award with the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the University of Houston African American Studies Dissertation Fellowship, the Ima Hogg Scholarship with the Dolph-Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Fred White Jr. and Mary M. Hughes Research Fellowships in Texas History with the Texas State Historical Association. An engaged activist scholar, the historian currently serves as a member for the OAH Committee on the Status of Women in the Historical Profession and is past chair of the 2015 Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize Committee, also with the OAH. She also serves on the Ottis Locke Prize Committee with the ETHA as well as a past ETHA board member. The co-advisor of the Sigma Phi Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society, Pruitt has also served on the National Advisory Board and National Council of the honor society.

María Esther Hammack received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin in May 2021. She is a Mexican scholar and public historian whose work centers freedom fighters who left the United States for Mexico, to be free, during the nineteenth century, the Black Diaspora in Mexico and the shared histories of slavery, liberation, and abolition North America writ large. She is the 2021-2023 McNeil Center's Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Find her on twitter: Maria Esther, twitter handle @lorientinuviel; or at her website: https://mariaestherhammack.me

Jessica Brannon-Wranosky is the Distinguished Professor of Digitial Humanities and History at Texas A&M University-Commerce. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of North Texas. Dr. Brannon-Wranosky specializes in women, gender and sexuality history and digital humanities applications. Her work has appeared in a number of regional and national academic journals, anthologies, and a variety of online digital publications and exhibits. Her most recent publications include Impeached: The Removal of Texas Governor James E. Ferguson, A Centennial Examination coedited with Bruce A. Glasrud, (Texas A&M University Press, forthcoming 2017), and essays by her in Texas Women/American Women: Their Lives and Times (University of Georgia Press, 2015)—a 2016 winner of the Liz Carpenter Award, Discovering Texas History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), and This Corner of Canaan: Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell (University of North Texas Press, 2013). Dr. Brannon-Wranosky has received several awards for her research including TSHA’s John H. Jenkins Award in 2015 and the Texas Oral History Association’s Best Article Award in 2016. She is currently working on a book project that examines southern state legislatures’ regulation of sexuality, sexual violence, and women’s reproductive health from 1870-1975.

Allison received her Ph.D. in American history with a specialty in Jewish History from the University of Texas at Austin. She currently teaches at the University of Cincinnati and its Blue Ash campus.