Speaker Series

The October TX Talks session, jointly sponsored by the German Texan Heritage Society and Dallas Goethe Center, will feature TAMU history professor Walter Kamphoefner, who will speak about the multilingual heritage of Texas.  

Dr. Kamphoefner will put into historical perspective the perennial debate over the multicultural and multilingual history of Texas, and by extension the U.S., in light of the recent executive order declaring English as the official language of the U.S. Considering that the state constitution and laws were translated into Spanish and German with “Bohemian” soon following, TX was “officially” trilingual from its earliest days. This was reinforced by the fact that many counties taught those and other heritage languages in the public schools until effectively ended by anti-German hysteria and resurrection of the KKK in the WWI era. The initiatives for bilingual education and ballot translations some 50 years later were thus less of an…