The Portal to Texas History 2023 Research Fellowship Awardee

Dr. Whitney Nell Stewart

Project Title

The Story of Texas: History-Making at Varner-Hogg Plantation

Project Description

“The Story of Texas: History-Making at Varner-Hogg Plantation” explores the transformation of a single southeast Texas plantation over two hundred years, guiding readers through Varner-Hogg’s changing landscape from Indigenous homeland to Old 300 settlement, sugar plantation to oil field, private home to public museum. In charting the changing purpose and meaning of this one place, “The Story of Texas” also examines exactly how, who, and what makes history in the Lone Star State.

Biography

Whitney Nell Stewart is a historian of the US South. She is author of This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming Fall 2023), as well as articles in Winterthur Portfolio, Journal of Social History, and Journal of the Early Republic, among other publications. Her work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, as well as research and writing fellowships at the Smithsonian, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Huntington Library, and the Texas State Historical Association, among others. She is an assistant professor of history and faculty in the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas.