Learn more about women's historic role in the law enforcement profession.
Meet Jan Devereaux
Author and historian Jan Devereaux serves as a Texas Ranger Hall of Fame volunteer on the collections and exhibits committees. Her book Pistols, Petticoats, & Poker: The Real Lottie Deno: No Lies or Alibis (High Lonesome Books, 2009), described as a "tour de force of in-depth research" gives us the real Lottie Deno, one of the Wild West's most fascinating characters. She was awarded the 2025 Dan Parkinson Literary Award by the Old Fort Velasco Historical Association and the Old Velasco/Surfside Beach Historical Committee in Surfside, Texas. The award honors those who utilize their writing skills to promote historical narratives.
Learn more about Bernardo de Galvez. Details to come.
Meet Richard McCaslin, Ph.D.
Richard B. McCaslin, the Director of Publications for the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), is the retired TSHA Professor of Texas History at the University of North Texas and the author or editor of nineteen books. Eight of these won awards, while his biography of Robert E. Lee was nominated for a Pulitzer. He is currently working on two co-authored works focused on the Civil War—a biography of a Texas Unionist and an analysis of the wartime Texas cotton trade--as well as a biography of Pompeo Coppini. a prolific sculptor whose public works in Texas include the Alamo Cenotaph. A Fellow of the TSHA and Admiral in the Texas Navy, McCaslin has commendations from the Civil War Round Tables in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Shreveport for his academic work.
Hear about women on the Sante Fe Trail. Details to come.
Meet Michelle M. Martin, Ph.D.
Dr. Michelle M. Martin is a Michigander by birth and a Kansan and Okie by choice. Martin is a historian who earned her doctorate at the University of New Mexico in May 2022. Her research probes interracial marriage, gender, race, and power in the Mvskoke Nation in the Indian Territory from 1870-1897.
She earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in history at Western Michigan University. After graduating, Martin embarked on a nearly twenty-year career in academic and public history. For nine years she taught full and part time at the two and four year college level in Kansas and Oklahoma. She also worked in the television and film industry for nearly ten years as a researcher, script writer, and field producer. Projects she has contributed to have aired on PBS, A&E, History Channel, Investigation Discovery, and at National Park Service units in Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. For several years Martin worked as a museum director, and she has served on numerous museum boards and has provided consulting services for small museums in Kansas and Oklahoma. Martin has also lectured on various historical topics across the country for museums, state and national historic sites, and educational institutions.
Her research interests include the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity in the U.S. West from 1800-1900, the history of Indigenous-Euro American relations in the Indian Territory (in the Mvskoke and Semvnole Nations specifically) from 1840-1925, interracial marriage and families in the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and gender and race based violence in the West.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of History and the Coordinator of the Public History Certificate in the Department of History at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Tahlequah is the capital of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee.
Martin lives in Tahlequah and is a proud cat mamma to Josie. Her husband, Dr. Donald Fixico (Mvskoke/Semvnole/Shawnee/Sac and Fox) is a Distinguished Foundation Professor and Regents' Professor of History at Arizona State. The couple travel back and forth between their two homes. When not working, Michelle enjoys hiking, travel, photography, documenting severe weather, watching college and professional football, and volunteering as a living history interpreter at various state and national historic sites.
Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule by Matthew Babcock explains how war-weary, mutually suspicious Apaches and Spaniards negotiated an ambivalent compromise after 1786 that produced over four decades of uneasy peace across the region. In response to drought and military pressure, thousands of Apaches settled near Spanish presidios in a system of reservation-like establecimientos, or settlements, stretching from Laredo to Tucson. Far more significant than previously assumed, the establecimientos constituted the earliest and most extensive set of military-run reservations in the Americas and served as an important precedent for Indian reservations in the United States. Babcock's research reveals the importance of Apache-Hispanic diplomacy in reducing cross-cultural violence and the limits of indigenous acculturation and assimilation into empires and states.
Meet Matthew Babcock, Ph.D.
Matthew Babcock, associate professor of history at the University of North Texas, is a specialist in U.S. history, and focuses on the history of North American borderlands, American Indians, and the colonial Southwest. He joined the faculty in August 2010 after teaching history at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, and working as a research associate in the Center for Regional Heritage Research. Babcock also taught undergraduate history courses at Austin College and Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Babcock earned a Ph.D. in History from SMU. He earned his master's in History from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his bachelor's in History and Spanish from Dartmouth College.
Hear more about the annual event at the historic Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos River.
Meet Tom Ashmore
Tom spent 22 years in the Air Force as a special intelligence analyst. After retiring from active duty, he taught special intelligence skills for another five years worldwide and then 15 years at the Air Force Intelligence School at Goodfellow AFB, Texas. He completed a book in 2019, updated in 2024, on his Butterfield Trail investigations, entitled The Butterfield Trail through the Concho Valley and West Texas. He completed a second book in 2025 on the 3-year study on Camp Meyers Spring, Texas. He is currently the president of the West Texas Archeological Society and a board member of the Southwest Federation of Archeological Societies.
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Hear more about Texas Ranger burial locations.
Meet William E. Moore
William E. Moore is a retired professional archaeologist and former sole proprietor of Brazos Valley Research Associates (BVRA) in Bryan, Texas, where he currently lives. He is the author of several books including The Texas Calaboose and Other Forgotten Jails (Texas A&M University Press, 2019), as well as articles and national magazines. He is the sole living member of the Houston Archeological Society.
Learn more about the Kansas City Stockyards.
Meet Michael Grauer
Mr. Grauer holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in art history from the University of Kansas; Master of Arts in art history from Southern Methodist University; and Master of Arts in history from West Texas A&M University. Beginning his career at Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1984, he was curator of art and Western heritage at Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum for 31 years. He was recruited to become McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture and curator of cowboy collections and Western art at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum where he worked for six years. He has curated over 160 exhibitions and authored over 75 publications on art, culture, and history of the American West. He taught at West Texas A&M University for over twenty years. He was the 2012 University of Kansas Department of Art History's distinguished alumnus. He was inducted into the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame at Dodge City, Kansas, as Cowboy Historian for 2021.