Dr. Jody Edward Ginn: Author, Public Speaker, and Texas History Specialist in Woodway, TX

Borderlands/Indians. Texas/Jim Crow Era. Mexico/Texas. Ethnohistory. Legal and Political. Myth and Memory.

• “East Texas Troubles: Governor Allred and His Rangers Defy Jim Crow” Journal of the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society, Vol. 9. No.1 Fall 2019  Texas Supreme Court Historical Society
  

• “American Indians in the Republic of Texas: A Case Study for Moving Beyond Traditional Perspectives,” in Single Star of the West: The Republic of Texas, 1836-1845. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, Spring 2017). Kenneth Howell and Charles Swanlund, eds.
  

• Saving Palmito Ranch Battlefield: The Texas Historical Commission’s Effort for the Last Land Battle of the Civil War, co-authored with William H. McWhorter, Texas Historical Commission (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018).
  

• The Lenape Legacy of Delaware Chief John Conner: Transnational Mediators of North America
• De-mythologizing the 1930 Sherman Race Riot and Lynching of George Hughes 
• De-mythologizing The Bloody Legacy of Bonnie & Clyde: Their Victims’ Experience
• A Comparative Study of the Spanish Frontier “Flying Companies” and the early Texas Rangers
• Pancho Villa & Frank Hamer “Were Friends”: Forging a Unique Relationship in the US-Mexico Borderlands 
• An Environmental History Study of the Frontier Battalion Texas Rangers
• The Famous Patton Case: Murder of Migrant Farming Family in Depression-era Athens, Texas
• Depression-era “Love Triangle”: The 1936 Murder of Marlie Childs in Center, Texas 
• Major Figures of Early 20th Century Professional Rodeo
• Texas Rangers in Professional Rodeo: 1900-2023
  

• Texas State Historical Association – Life Member
• Texas Military Forces Museum Foundation – Member 
  

• 2022 Testified at the “1836 Commission” hearing, on the 21st Century goals for the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame and Museum, at the Texas State Capitol in Austin.
• Personal interviews with African American, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, including linguists and other consultants, across Texas and in Oklahoma, Hawaii, and Louisiana.
• 2000-present, Archival research at over 30 repositories and private collections: Tx; Ok; La., D.C.; Md; Hawaii.
• Online archival research in over 20 digitized collections from across the United States.
• 2017 Webinar on “Concealed Campus Carry Policy” Austin Community College, September 2017
• 2017 Webinar on “Sexual Harassment in the Workplace” Austin Community College, September 2017
• 2017 Webinar on “Dual-Credit Faculty Training” Austin Community College, September 2017
• 1998-2000 “Underwater Archaeology” and “Diving for Science” Aquarena Center-Texas State University
• 2005 Master Peace Officer License (inactive) Texas Commission on Law Enforcement 
• 2003 In-service training on “Active Shooter Response” ALERRT/Texas State University August 2003
• 1,450+ classroom hours of professional in-service training in law enforcement, investigations, private security management, and military specialties.
  

PhD-UNT Department of History:

Biographical Summary

My research interests are focused primarily on 19th and early 20th century Texas, Borderlands Indians, and Texas and Mexico—with particular emphasis on crime in the period of the Mexican Revolution and the Jim Crow Era. I often focus on examining the relationships between members of the politically dominant Anglo population and diverse regional minority populations, including Tejanos, Texas Indians and African-American Texans. I am particularly interested in investigating longstanding myths, as well as examining the lived experiences and recognizing the agency and contributions of minority Texans to the historical development of Texas, which were often ignored or misrepresented in the traditional Anglophone literature. 

My dissertation investigates the rise and fall of an East Texas organized crime ring that built its power by exploiting Jim Crow-era limitations on black Texans’ access to the criminal justice system, and it is founded in part on three complete trial transcripts from 1935 (combined with thousands of pages of additional court records, news articles, and various other primary source documents), in which white jurors convicted white men based on the testimony of black victims and witnesses. The University of Oklahoma Press approved a revised and expanded version of that manuscript for publication, which is due out August 2019. 

An archival research assignment on behalf of the Texas Historical Commission (THC) into previously inaccessible primary documents related to the “Last Battle of the Civil War” revealed that an earlier and larger battle had occurred at that site. That research also upheld some long-disputed assertions by the Confederate commander and debunked some longstanding myths as to the make-up of Texas troops under his command. Also of significance, the earlier battle involved the only known case of foreign troops to have engaged in partisan combat on American soil during the Civil War. I coauthored a book on behalf of the THC (due out September 2018 from Texas A&M University Press) on the history and preservation of the Palmito Ranch Civil War Battlefield, and an account of the earlier battle was first published in the journal of the West Texas Historical Association, in 2014.

In the most recent anthology on the history of the Republic of Texas, I reveal my research into the only American Indian to have been awarded a land grant in Texas. I uncovered the existence of this heretofore forgotten historical anomaly in a lawsuit over the land filed by the grantee’s heirs two decades after his death, which was preserved in the records of the Texas Supreme Court at the Texas State Library and Archives (TSLAC). Given that the Constitution of the Republic of Texas specifically forbade those of Indian or African descent from receiving land grants, the Texas General Land Office archivist from whom I first requested to see the file disputed its existence. It had only been made possible by a special act of the Texas legislature, the records of which I had also uncovered at TSLAC.

What began during my MA studies as a research paper for a course in myth and memory in history—on the Texas Rangers, one of the most mythologized institutions in Texas history—grew and evolved with years of further research and analysis into a chapter in an anthology on myth, memory, and identity in Texas history. Over the years, I have presented portions and evolving versions of that research at conferences and symposiums around the state and at the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2011.