A native Texan, Gregg Cantrell was born in Sweetwater and has lived
in Cooper, Abilene (where he went to high school), College Station,
Huntsville, Austin, Dallas, Denton, and Fort Worth. He was educated at Texas
A&M University, where he earned a BBA in Management (1979), MBA in
Management (1980), and PhD in History (1988). He enjoys tennis,
racquetball, fishing, camping, and following the Texas Rangers, Houston
Rockets, and Dallas Cowboys. He has taught at Sam Houston State,
Hardin-Simmons, UNT, and, since 2003, TCU, where he holds the Erma and Ralph Lowe Chair in Texas History.
Cantrell has held held fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies. He is a
member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the Philosophical Society
of Texas, and in 2013-2014 he served as president of the Texas State
Historical Association. He has written widely on nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century Texas, including the era of the Texas Revolution and
Republic and the Agrarian Revolt of the 1890s. He teaches
undergraduate and graduate courses on Texas and US history, including
the graduate reading seminar on US history and historiography to 1877,
His most recent article is Our
Very Pronounced Theory of Equal Rights to All”: Race, Citizenship, and
Populism in the South Texas Borderlands,” Journal of American History
100 (Dec. 2013). He also just published the fifth edition of
his bestselling college textbook, The
History of Texas, (fifth edition) coauthored with Robert A. Calvert
and Arnoldo De León.
His current research project is a history of the Texas Populist party
of the 1890s.
