Three Questions is an initiative to share the value that our faculty, students, and external patrons derive from using the Portal to Texas History at UNT Libraries.
1. How important is the Portal in your teaching, learning or research?
My teaching, learning or research are closely intertwined, and the Portal plays in important
role in all of them. It was an invaluable resource in annotating the memoirs of the first Aggie
valedictorian, William A. Trenckmann, Preserving German Texan Identity (2019). Thanks to the Portal,
there were virtually no personal references that we were unable to identify. I am also interested
in the way that various ethnic and racial minorities interacted with each other, and here I made
one of the most intriguing discoveries on the Portal: A Spanish language paper in San Antonio,
El Bejareño, quoted the Neu Braunfelser Zeitung on October 27, 1855 to the effect that the
antiforeign Know Nothings were scaring good prosperous German immigrants away from Texas.
However, my excitement subsided somewhat when I realized, thanks to the Portal, that the Tejano
editor probably got the story from an English language paper, several of which carried the story,
rather than directly from the German.
2. How has the Portal changed the way you approach your research, teaching or learning?
My Spanish is pretty rudimentary, three semesters worth nearly forty years ago, so research in that language was hardly feasible before. But searching for a name or an election month in the Portal has made it possible to utilize some Spanish language sources. Having grown up in the microfilm era and wearing thick lenses to show for it, the ease of research in newspapers of any language is incomparably more efficient thanks to the Portal. Another of my interesting discoveries there were letters written home in German by Texans serving in France in World War I, leading to my article titled “Doughboys auf Deutsch” in Yearbook of German American Studies vol. 54.
3. What do you want others to know about your research, teaching or learning?
I’m teaching a capstone seminar on immigration history in the fall, so I want to expose my students to the excitement of primary source research. It’s hard to get them to the library these days, except for the coffee bar, so the fact that they can access primary sources, newspapers and others, through the Portal right from their laptop should enhance the quality of papers they produce.
Born, raised, and educated in Missouri, Walter D. Kamphoefner arrived at Texas A&M in 1988, where he specializes in immigration history and the Civil War era. An anthology of immigrant letters which he co-edited, News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (1991), was presented by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to his hosts on his June 2025 visit to Washington, DC. Kamphoefner’s latest book, Germans in America: A Concise History (2021), will appear in German translation in fall 2025.
