The Rice Historical Society

Events and Projects

RHS supports itself primarily through membership dues. “The lowest-level membership is still $25 a year,” Rogers says. “And it’s a deal because we don’t charge people anything to come to our events unless it’s something where we have to buy a ticket to a play or something like that.” RHS holds about three events each spring and fall semester, an annual meeting in June, and a seasonal party here and there. Members also receive a quarterly newsletter, The Cornerstone, and discounts on books published by the society.

RHS events generally have a speaker who gives a talk on some aspect of Rice history or a related topic. “Most of the time, we have historians like John Boles,” Rogers says, “but we’ve also had speakers like linguistics professor Nancy Niedzielski, who gave a talk contrasting the way people spoke around the time of the founding of the university with the way they speak now.” Any aspect of Rice is fair game, and other topics have included the history of choosing Rice presidents and how the process has evolved over time, a botanical tour of the campus, Albert Thomas and the role Rice played in bringing NASA to Houston, campus architecture, athletics, the evolution of the Rice Hotel, and Rice’s role in the founding and development of International University Bremen. RHS events usually are held on the Rice campus or elsewhere in Houston, although members occasionally go to Galveston for lectures, tours, or parties.

Because the minimal expenses associated with events and parties are paid for ad hoc by the membership, RHS dues are designated for other projects that meaningfully contribute to the historical study of Rice. One of the principal projects is The Cornerstone, which contains historical articles about Rice. Wanda Waters, a friend Rogers had known both in high school and at Rice, agreed to be the newsletter’s editor for the first year or two, and she came up with the name and established the format.

When Waters stepped down, Boles approached Mary Dix to take up the reins. Dix, who had just retired from Rice after 26 years as editor of The Papers of Jefferson Davis, agreed, and she has edited The Cornerstone since. A professional historical editor, Dix is pleased with the articles published in The Cornerstone. “They’re usually quite good, and they’re very personal,” she says. “Good topics on Rice aren’t difficult to come up with. There’s just an amazing amount of history. I don’t know of any school with so much.”

Kean is enthusiastic about The Cornerstone. “From a historian’s perspective, it’s extremely well done,” she says. “Obviously, it’s not scholarly material, but the articles are well researched, and the writers work really hard on them. I know, because I see them searching the archives. And that’s a valuable service in itself. The Woodson Research Center archives have not been thoroughly examined, and there are a lot of interesting things buried in there.”

RHS also has published two books. The first, written by Boles, was Edgar Odell Lovett and the Founding of the Rice Institute. “I’d given a variety of talks on the topic of Lovett and the speech he made at the opening of the institution,” Boles says. “Lovett’s vision is so central to what we’re doing now, and it’s the kind of document that everybody who is interested in Rice ought to read. But it was hard to find. It was printed in the Book of the Opening and in a pamphlet issued in 1916, but it hadn’t been reprinted since. I thought that it should be more readily available and that the speech’s initial impact would be better appreciated if readers had an understanding of the state of higher education at the time. So my idea was to preface that famous talk with an introductory scaffold.”

The second book is Houston as a Setting of the Jewel: The Rice Institute, a reprint of a book originally published in 1913 that spotlighted the opening of the Rice Institute. “It’s the best snapshot we have of Houston in 1912,” Rogers says. “It features the Rice Institute, but it also talks about all the public and private schools and the prominent men in business and city government as well as important architecture and the Houston Ship Channel.”

An upcoming book project had its genesis in the years when George Rupp was president. “A group of students at the time produced a volume about the history of Rice,” says Rogers. “Each student took a particular subject, like the development of the college system, the history of a specific college, or the history of women at Rice, and they published it. John Boles has been wanting to do that since.”

Boles and Kean even co-taught a Baker College course on Rice history, and the students wrote essays on their research. “It’s the kind of class where students can go down to Woodson and do real historical research based on authentic archival materials and primary sources,” Boles says. He and Kean selected the best of those essays for publication, and they hired one of the students to serve as editor, with RHS footing the costs. “If we have a class like this every couple of years,” Boles says, “we can turn out a series of books on different aspects of Rice history. In the future, having these kinds of vignettes of history will be important.”

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