Sam Houston State University: A History, 1879--2004

Sam Houston State University is no longer the simple "college on the hill," as it was known to the young men and women who first attended 125 years ago. Today it is a Carnegie Doctoral/Research Intensive Institution offering 135 undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate programs. What began in 1879 as a "normal" school awarding diplomas to aspiring teachers grew into a degree-granting institution by 1919. Since then, 92,700 students have earned their Sam Houston degrees. Of those, nearly 57,000 are currently productive professionals enriching the working and cultural environment of every state in our nation and beyond. More than 13,400 students from every corner of Texas to thirty-five countries around the world currently claim this scenic Huntsville campus of hills and pines as their academic home. Yet, Sam Houston's beginnings as a training school, whose singular mission was to prepare teachers for the state's public classrooms, belie the major university that grew out of its humble origins.

In lively prose Sam Houston State University traces the school's development alongside the life of the campus. Through the description of the many fads, traditions, crises, and milestones that marked the ages, a distinct institutional identity emerges in this volume that will be at once both strangely fascinating and warmly familiar to those who have walked the campus as students, professors, staff, or visitors. This oversized, well-illustrated book presents a grand and colorful sweep of Sam Houston's 125-year history and will certainly occupy a prominent place in the homes and offices of all those who have been impacted by its warmth, accessibility, and purpose.

About theAuthor:
Ty Cashion is an award winning author and a professor of history at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. He received a Ph.D. from Texas Christian University in 1993. Texas Monthly included Cashion in a short list of "a new breed of scholars" who are "changing the way contemporary Texans look at their state." He is an occasional contributor to such newspapers as the Houston Chronicle and speaks regularly to civic groups on topics related to Texas and American Western history. Cashion's Texas Frontier (University of Oklahoma Press) won the Rupert Richardson Award in 1996 for "Best Book on Texas and Western History." His Pigskin Pulpit: A Social History of Texas High School Coaches (Texas State Historical Association, 1998) made several bestseller lists. He also co-edited a series of biographies with Frank de la Teja titled The Human Tradition in Texas.