Publisher's Synopsis
Charles Francis Guittard's I WILL TEACH HISTORY, the Life & Times of Francis Gevrier Guittard, Professor, Baylor University, written, edited, and illustrated by Baylor students from different eras and generations, is the third volume of a trilogy about the legendary professor, Frank Guittard, and his times (1867-1950). Professor Guittard's story is told conversationally in dialogues with the author's grandchildren, the peanut gallery, who are not afraid to challenge him or each other on nearly anything and everything. The overall effect is an extraordinary rendering of the chronicle of a teenaged scholar-pilgrim, with little parental guidance or financial resources and completely on his own, dispatched from Ohio by train in hard times to somehow make a living and life for himself in Texas. Then, after working sixteen years to obtain two degrees to escape being consigned to a meager living teaching in poor country schools while boarding with area pastors, a small dog appeared, and an ensuing twist of fate changed everything.
The volume covers both his public side as a teacher and his private sides as a husband and father who had moments of great joy and achievement along with those of deep personal grief and devastation, and concludes with his late-life lonely struggle to earn a Ph.D. Significant moments in the history of Baylor contextualizing Frank's life both as a Baylor student and as a professor of history are revealed including the last days of the still formidable and prickly President Rufus C. Burleson, the sudden departure of an able successor president in the wake of a student protest, the rise and fall of a student self-government amid related honor code violations, the campus evolution controversy pitting progressive university-builder President Samuel P. Brooks against a fundamentalist preacher and self-anointed snake-killer, combined with pictures of both the starchily sanctimonious and the darker sides of a wild and woolly turn of the century Waco, and the ominous resurgence of a resurrected Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. All of the above is revealed in a lively manner punctuated by moments of humor and imaginatively recreated scenes from Frank's life and era and that of the Baylor he loved, along with fifteen original illustrations.
Baylor University, Stanford University, University of Chicago, Teacher, Texas, Choice of profession, Winds of chance, Twist of fate, Ph.D., Professor, History, Education, Biography, Memoir, Academic
