By: Dr. Andrew Yox, NTCC Honors Director
Scholars of Honors Northeast returned from the joint meeting of the Webb Society and the Texas State Historical Association in Austin last Saturday evening with over $1,000 in prizes, more than any other college or university in the state. For the second year in a row, the NTCC film project, this year centered on the story of Adina De Zavala and the Alamo, won the $600 Group Caldwell Prize. This was given for the most impressive project in Texas history by a collegiate group. Jalyn English, the film’s producer, accepted this award that will help fund the next group enterprise. Also in the Caldwell essay prize competition, Presidential Scholars, Katelyn Cox, and Maritza Quinones, placed second and third among the freshmen and sophomores in the state, winning $300 and $150.
Honors Director, Dr. Andrew Yox noted that the “NTCC film victories are really community victories. We receive extraordinary support, and although the list could be prioritized, it is not an easy list to contain. And now we are intimidating other contending groups, notably from Houston, San Antonio, and Jacksonville, who seemed closer this year to conceding the prize. But the Caldwell Group awards also showcase a team spirit among our NTCC honors students which has been amazing these last two years. Meanwhile, all six of our scholars who attended the meeting gave articulate presentations of their research. I thought we might sweep the prizes like last year. But we were thankful for the two, and Katelyn and Maritza were both very special in one respect. More than other students I have known to date, they assiduously interpreted and conceptualized primary-source materials week after week during the fall semester. They failed, they stumbled, and persevered. It was their dauntless spirit overcoming weaknesses in research that was singular, and inspiring.”
Cox’s prize winning work was on the Texas historian who serves as the eponymous father of the Webb Society, Walter Prescott Webb. Cox argued that the society that bears his name is one of several reasons why Webb was one of the greatest of American historians. Webb not only wrote prize-winning works such as The Texas Rangers about the past, and interjected history into the political debates of his time, he helped secure a historical tradition for the future. Webb helped initiate both the Junior Historians, and the Webb Society, the longest-running associations in the country for high-school students, and collegiate scholars, devoted to a single state’s history. Webb also pioneered the Texas Handbook, which he predicted would become the most referenced and utilized resource for the state’s history and culture. Today the Texas Handbook Online has had over twenty-five million discrete readers.
Maritza Quinones, coming in third, was the first student in the history of the college to not only star in a given film, but to win a scholarly prize for researching it. Her essay on “Adina De Zavala, and the Making of a Patriotic Supersite” formed the basis of the NTCC film. Quinones was also the first scholar to see De Zavala’s Roman Catholic mindset as central to her enterprise to both save, and risk herself for the entire Alamo structure. Quinones found the reference in the De Zavala papers at the Dolph Briscoe Center in Austin that detailed how De Zavala pledged herself to remain a virgin, and devote her life to teaching Christ’s example of sacrifice. These ideas drove De Zavala to risk her own life to highlight former Catholic structures which themselves had become imbued with the spirit of sacrifice because of the 1836 revolutionary battle.
NTCC’s third Caldwell-Award winning film resulted from the work of twelve NTCC honors students, and four non-honors students, grouped together as the members of the NTCC Walter Webb Society. NTCC honors students researched the film from scratch using primary documents at the Dolph Briscoe Center at the University of Texas in Austin last June. The group established an operational executive committee, earlier than previous efforts, in May of 2019, days after the end of the spring semester. Jacob Lambie and Peyton McClendon served as directors, Sam Griffin helped provide a musical score, and Jalyn English, a computer science major, spent long hours assembling and editing the film. Besides the Honors Director, Andrea Reyes, Title V Honors Coordinator, was the only member of the NTCC staff to work day-to-day with the students last summer. The group filmed in six locations last summer, receiving either free or very economical approvals to film at Tennison Methodist Church in Mount Pleasant, the Northeast Texas Rural History Museum, the Alamo Mission Museum of Franklin County, the Franklin County Historical Association, the campus of NTCC, and several B&B manors in Jefferson. The film’s premiere occurred recently at NTCC, on 21 February. Jalyn English’s final version of the full De Zavala film is also now on the website of Honors Northeast at http://www.ntcc.edu/honorsfilms.
