Edward Everett Dale
Edward Everett Dale was an American historian and longtime faculty member of the University of Oklahoma. He was a proponent of Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" and is known as a major influence on the historian Angie Debo.
Biography
Dale was born on February 8, 1879, in a rural area called "Cross Timbers" near Keller, Tarrant County, Texas. Later his father had a farm in Greer County, Texas, where Dale lived in his youth. His mother died when he was five which left his father and an older brother to raise him. In 1892 the family relocated to Greer County, Texas. In 1896 Greer County became part of the Indian Territories when the United States Supreme Court resolved a land dispute between Texas and Oklahoma over their common boundary. Dale's early schooling was irregular. After his last attendance in grade school he was urged to sit for an examination that would award him a common school diploma. Attendance at a summer Normal Institute sponsored by Washita County gave him a certificate to teach school with the goal of earning money to buy calves for the ranch he and brother were trying to establish. After serving as schoolmaster at Cloud Chief and other small towns in the region he found that teaching agreed with him so he attended the Central Normal School at Edmond to strengthen his teaching credentials. A combination of summer sessions at the University of Oklahoma and later as full-time student gave him enough credits to graduate from the University of Oklahoma in 1911. Following a position as Superintendent of Schools in Blair, 1911–13, he decided a career at that level was not what he wanted. However, in order to teach at the college level he would need to go to graduate school; thus at age 33 he applied for a scholarship to Harvard. A year at Harvard University earned him a master's degree in 1914 which was followed in 1922 by a doctorate from Harvard where Frederick Jackson Turner served as his thesis advisor. He started as an assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma in 1914 and remained there until his retirement in 1952 as emeritus research professor.Historical theories
Dale's thesis of Oklahoma history was that the succession of migrants moving westward over time had created a new, uniquely American society that had moved away from European influence. Oklahoma, where settlers incorporated the remnants of both the indigenous Native American tribes and the so-called "Five civilized tribes" that had been forcibly resettled from the Southeastern United States, developed a particularly unique unwritten law he called "Cow Custom", that later became embedded in the state's legal code and institutions.Mentorship of Angie Debo
Angie Debo enrolled in a class Dale taught at the University of Oklahoma on American history and government in 1916, and again in January 1917. Debo described him as having a "cowboy walk" and "soft voice". Dale taught her formal methods of recording and writing about history that she would use throughout her life. He considered her his "outstanding student" and considered himself her "academic godfather".Debo became disillusioned with Dale in 1937 when he ignored her request to be considered as a replacement for historian Morris Wardell, who was leaving the university for a position at the University of Chicago. The university later hired male faculty members who were less qualified or accomplished than Debo, and refused to publish Debo's seminal first book about Indian relations in Oklahoma, And Still the Waters Run, later published by the Princeton University Press. Dale was not especially misogynist for his era, and both his reluctance to hire her as a colleague and the university's decision to reject the book arose not only from the pervasive discrimination against women academics at the time but also her "blunt" confrontational academic approach and the "explosive" nature of her research. Despite remaining cordial, Debo carried a resentment over these incidents until her death in 1989.