Richard Bruce Winders, Ph.D.
Curriculum Vita
Current Employment
Historian & Curator for the Alamo
Education
Ph.D. Texas Christian University,
Department of History, December 1994
Dissertation: "Mr. Polk’s Army:
Politics, Patronage, and the American
Military
in the Mexican War"
Major Field: United States History
Minor Fields:
Spanish Borderlands & Military History
Dissertation
Director: Dr. Grady McWhiney
M.A. University of Texas
at Arlington, Department of History, December 1990
Thesis:
"The Role of the Mississippi Volunteer in Northern Mexico"
University of Texas at Arlington, Department of Education, December 1981
Teacher Certification
B.A. Murray State University, Department of Geology, December 1977
Major: Geology
Minor: Spanish
Professional Experience
The Alamo
Historian & Curator
July 1996 to PresentTexas Christian University
Graduate Faculty/Adjunct Faculty
Teaching Duties: United States History Survey (To 1877 & Since 1877)
1991 to 1996
Tarrant County Junior College
Instructor, United
States History Survey (To 1877)
August 1992 to December
1992
Arlington Independent School District
Classroom Teacher and
Chairman of Social Studies Department
November 1981 to May 1990
Primary Teaching Fields:
United States History, 19th Century Social and
Political History, Civil
War and Reconstruction, Old South, Jacksonian
America
Secondary
Teaching Fields: Spanish Borderlands, Military History, Texas
History,
Mexican History
Honors and Awards
2003: Crisis in the Southwest Winner of the Sons of the Republic of Texas Summerfield G. Roberts Award
2003: Crisis in the Southwest Runner Up for TSTA Bates Award
2002: Crisis in the Southwest named "Outstanding Academic Title of
2002" by
Choice
2001:
"Yellow Rose" Award from San Antonio Women’s Club for excellence in
education
2000: Chair of Local Arrangements for Western History Association Annual
Meeting
1999: The United States and Mexico at War awarded Sanchez Lamego Book
Prize
1998: The United States and Mexico at War named Editor’s Choice by Book List
1997: Mr. Polk’s Army awarded The Jerry Coffey Memorial Book Prize
1997: Mr. Polk’s Army designated a History Book Club Selection
1997: Named a Fellow of the Grady McWhiney Research Foundation
1991-94: Texas Christian University, Graduate Fellowship
1990: DAR’s American History Teacher of the Year for Arlington
Independent
School District
1987: 1st Place Winner of E. C. Barksdale Student Essay Contest
1986-87: Teacher of the Year for Workman Junior High School
Publications: Books, Articles, and the Web
Sacrificed at the Alamo: Tragedy and Triumph in the Texas Revolution. State House Press, 2004
Davy
Crockett: The Legend of the Wild, Frontier. Rosen Publishing Group.
August
2003.
Crisis
in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle for Texas.
Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2002.
Mr.
Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War. 3rd
printing, paperback edition;
College Station: Texas A & M University Press,
2002.
Mr.
Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War. 2nd
printing, paperback edition; College
Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2001.
Regular contributor to San Antonio Food & Leisure and San Antonio Visitors
Guide. 1999-2001.
Mapping Texas History: Colonization to Statehood. Daughter of the Republic of
Texas, 2001.
"Will the Regiment Stand It? The 1st North Carolina Mutinies at
Buena Vista,"
Dueling Eagles:
Reinterpreting the U.S.-Mexican War, 1846-1848. Fort Worth: Texas Christian
University, 2000.
"The Mexican War," The Encyclopedia of the United States in the
Nineteenth
Century. New York: Charles
Scriber’s Sons, 2000.
Assistant Editor & Contributor. The United States and Mexico at War:
Nineteenth-Century
Expansionism and Conflict. New York: Macmillan, 1998.
Mr.
Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War.
College
Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1997.
"Alamo Visitor Brochure." San Antonio: Clark Printing. 1997.
"Composed of Different Material: Democracy, Discipline and the Mexican
War
Volunteer," Papers of the
Bi-National Conference on the War Between Mexico
and the United States. Brownsville:
National Parks Service, 1995.
"Puebla’s Forgotten Heroes." Military History of the West. (Spring 1994) :1-23.
"Mr. Polk’s Generals," Papers of the Second Palo Alto Battlefield
Conference.
Brownsville: National Parks Service,
1994.
Co-author. Instructor’s Resource Manual: Mary Beth Norton et. al. A People and
A
Nation: A History of the United
States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
"The Boys for Mexico: The Organization of the United States Army on the Eve
of
War with Mexico," Proceedings of
the First Palo Alto Battlefield Conference.
Brownsville: National Parks Service,
1993.
Cartographic Illustrator. Richard N. Current, et al., eds. Encyclopedia of
the
Confederacy. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
"Fighters For Freedom: The Texas Volunteers," Essays in History: The
E. C.
Barksdale
Student Lectures. 1987-88. Arlington:
University of Texas at Arlington
Campus Printing Service, 1988.
"The Alamo." http://www.thealamo.org
"The American Army in the Mexican War: An Overview." KERA PBS Online.
http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/
Publications: Reviews
–A
Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the
Mexican-American War, Paul Foos.
Southwestern Historical Quarterly.
Forthcoming.
Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol, Richard R.
Flores.
Western Historical Quarterly. Forthcoming.
Bound
for Sante Fe: The Road to New Mexico and the American Conquest,
1806-1848, Stephen G. Hyslop. East
Texas Historical Quarterly. Forthcoming.
The
Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West, Michael L. Tate. Great Plains
Quarterly. Summer 2001.
Aztec
Club of 1847, Military Society of the Mexican War: Sesquicentennial
History,
1847-1997, Richard H. Breithaupt, Jr. Civil
War History. 1999.
Alexander William Doniphan: Portrait of a Missouri Moderate, Roger D. Launius,
and Doniphan’s Expedition: An
Account of the Conquest of Mexico, John Taylor
Hughes. Journal of Military History.
1999.
Defiant Peacemaker: Nicholas Trist in the Mexican War, Wallace Ohrt.
H-SHEAR.
July 1998.
Three
Roads to Texas, William C. Davis. The San Antonio Express News. May
31, 1998.
On the
Prairie of Palo Alto: Historical Archaeology of the U.S.-Mexican War
Battlefield, Charles M. Haecker and
Jeffrey G. Mauck. Public Historian. (Spring
1998) : 100-103.
The
March to Monterrey: The Diary of Lt. Rankin Dilworth, ed. by Lawrence R.
Clayton and Joseph E. Chance, and
Mexico Under Fire: Being the Diary of
Samuel Ryan Curtis, 3rd
Ohio Volunteer Regiment During the Military Occupation
of Northern Mexico, 1846-1847, ed. by
Joseph E. Chance. West Texas Historical
Association Yearbook, 1997.
An
Immigrant Soldier in the Mexican War, Frederick Zeh. Southwestern
Historical
Quarterly. (Summer 1996) : 108.
The
Class of 1846, by John C. Waugh. Journal of Southern History. (August
1995):
604-605.
Philosophy of Education
Many
people associate education solely with school, a notion that says that
learning takes place within the walls
of a classroom. It also implies that a person
who completes a course of study has
learned all there is to know about a subject
or group of subjects. Thus, a person
who has attended school is said to have been
educated. Nothing could be further
from the truth.
Education is a life-long endeavor, the success of which depends largely on
the
individual. A person has to be open
to learning before knowledge can be
achieved. He or she also has to be
willing to embrace opportunities to learn that
occur outside a formal educational
setting. In this paradigm the educator is a
guide who starts his or her students
on a life-long journey of discovery. The main
task of the educator is to create a
desire to learn the will last after his or her time
spent with the student has passed.