Pictured (from left) is: Ariana Tagg, Isabel Tresidder, and Stephanie Hernandez
By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
For over a decade, the students of the “BioTex” honors seminar at NTCC have experienced a November “email shootout.” This is something like a cross between an ongoing basketball game with scores changing in real time, and a fast-paced, scholarly-poetic thinkathon. The course challenges students to conceptualize the elements of their Texas history research essays, to utilize crossover “analogs, (terms)” particularly from biology and other scientific fields, and to provide terse definitions of newly minted concepts.
This year, Isabel Tresidder from Naples bested all others, winning $50. She coined and defined an interrelated conceptual field for her research on Lyndon Johnson. Tresidder is also the film scholar behind the upcoming honors film on oil and Texas politics. According to Tresidder, the lanky Texan President, Lyndon Johnson, has heretofore been described best by two historians. Robert Caro has developed the “Megalomaniac View” that Johnson was constantly in search of power, and went about the attainment of it with almost no ideological ballast. Robert Dallek has developed the model of the “Oscillating Personality,” that Johnson was a man beset by two opposing tendencies, to help the unfortunate, and but also to win at all costs. Against these two views, Tresidder has posted her “Insecurity Thesis,” that Johnson was a man beset by “Chronic Desperation.” His first career efforts to overcome the shame of his early years was replaced by the shame he felt accepting continual bribes from Texas oilmen. Johnson’s own shame sensibility became a medium with which he demonized enemies such as the head of the U.S. Energy Commission, Leland Olds, who Johnson called a “Communist,” and Robert Kennedy, who he called a “little runt.”
Ariana Tagg came in second and won $30. Her topic is Rita Clements, the woman whose charm, conferred aid, and support helped power William Clements to become Texas’ first Republican governor since the 1870s. The union of Rita with Bill, according to Tagg, was “Bigger than Politics.” True, Rita had been a leader in the Dallas-area Republican party, and Bill was interested in running for governor, but Rita entered into marriage
with Clements with a “Perfervid Passion.” After a suffering “Mega-Humiliation” at the hands of her first husband, the montainier businessman, Richard Bass, Rita felt very alone, and unable to imagine another love for her life. Clements alone had the money and reputation to restore her shattered self image, and her fanatical particpation in the election of 1978 likely turned the dial in favor of Clements. Rita, for example, campaigned in west Texas, the place where Clements won his most lopsided victories on the county level.
Another Presidential Scholar, Stephanie Hernandez, came in third, winning $20. Hernandez is the first to portray the history of “Painted Voices,” the story of Mexian-American murals in Texas. Her saga begins with the “Protest Palette,” the more militant murals in Texas during the 1960s and 1970s, and ends with the “Mosaic Vanguard” settling more for images of pride and accommodation.
Amidst the individual competition, there was also a team element. Isabel’s team members including this year’s honors film producer, Yahir Garcia, and Andrianna Price, working with the story of the Texas bluebonnet, won $10 each for scoring the most team points.
Honors Director and Texas history professor Dr. Andrew Yox notes that “conceptualization is the key to writing an alluring, coherent essay, animated by a creative argument. It also is the key to writing conference-accepting abstracts. Our students do this well, and there are many more we could mention not only in the honors seminar, but in non-honors sections of history where a state-mandated goal is to form a “creative argument.” At the same time, I am very excited about the conceptualized projects Tresidder, Tagg, Hernandez, Price, and Garcia are developing.”
Tresidder, a Presidential Scholar from Naples, also has been working on a special research-based course this semester on rodent parasites. Tagg will play the role of Rita Clements in the upcoming honors film, and was homeschooled, and is from Mount Pleasant. Hernandez, Price, and Garcia are all graduates of Mount Pleasant High School.
The Cunningham Conceptualization Awards receive their name from Emmalea (Shaw) Cunningham who as a Presidential Scholar at NTCC won a Guistwhite Award, and published the essay, “Blind to Brown,” the story of how Northeast Texas came to accept federal mandates to integrate their schools in the 1970s. It was also a highly conceptualized, award-winning article. Cunningham also became the first NTCC honors alumni to donate a significant amount to Honors Northeast. After receiving her doctorate, Emmalea is now a licensed therapist, married and a mother, living in Georgetown, Texas.
