The 2017 issue of Touchstone, the collegiate journal of the Texas State Historical Association released this spring, contains a record three essays by current Northeast Texas Community College Presidential Scholars. All three were prize-winning works.†They included Emmalea Shaw?s Caldwell-Award-winning essay on integration in Northeast Texas, William Jones? Great-Plains-Honors-Council-Award-winning essay on quasi-criminal and vigilante, Dutch Luman, †and Melody Mott?s Smallwood-and-Caldwell-Award-winning essay on Texas-Japanese relations in the Twentieth Century.
?What I find so stimulating about our students? essays is their conceptual originality, and relevance.† Shaw provides the first persuasive account of how small Southern towns came to accept racial integration in the 1960s and 1970s.† Jones indicates ways used by the state 100 years ago to avoid high incarceration rates, and runaway spending on the penal system.† Mott?s essay provides a template for conceiving how one might characterize the foreign relations of a single American state, and a foreign nation,? Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director, said.
The 2017 issue is a most singular one for NTCC in that six of the 11 main essays were written by NTCC students, former students, and in one case?the Touchstone Corner, reserved for a senior historian?Dr. Andrew Yox, on the film culture of NTCC.† The other two student essays by former NTCC scholars are: ?William P. Hobby?s Crusade in the Transfiguration of Southeast Texas,? by Hector Zuniga, and the ?Businessmen?s Centennial of 1836,? by Gabriela Quesada.† There is also in the back of the journal the chapter reports of the Walter Webb Society, and an article on NTCC?s Cherokee film work by NTCC?s film producer,†and Honors Scholar, Cassidy Watkins.
NTCC?s presence in Touchstone was a product too of strong mentoring and support services provided by Dr. Mary Hearron, Honors Professor along with Andrew Yox in the BioTex Honors Seminar for which the papers were first written; Windell Doddy who provided invaluable interviews for Shaw?s paper;† Whatley Enhancement Grants and the Friends of Honors Northeast who have stimulated NTCC film research, including Zuniga?s article; Margaret and Curtis Durham of Mount Pleasant who donated primary sources for Quesada?s article on the Texas Centennial; the staff of the Learning Resource Center at NTCC; and Dr. Chuck Hamilton who loaned his extensive book collection on historical filming to Yox.
Anyone interested in obtaining this year?s Touchstone should write Yox at ayox@ntcc.edu, or contact the Texas State Historical Association.
