Texas State celebrates publication of ‘LBJ’s America’ with panel discussion

INSIDE TXST

Jayme Blaschke | October 31, 2023

Texas State University hosted a panel discussion to celebrate the publication of “LBJ’s America: The Life and Legacies of Lyndon Baines Johnson” on Wednesday, Nov. 1.

The panel discussion ran from 6-7:15 p.m. in the LBJ Student Center Grand Ballroom. 

The panel discussion included the editors of “LBJ’s America,” Mark Atwood Lawrence, director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum, and Mark K. Updegrove, president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. Other panelists included contributing authors Melody Barnes, director of the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute for Democracy and former domestic policy advisor for President Obama; Laura Kalman, professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara; and Joshua Zeitz, contributing editor at Politico and former professor of history at Harvard University, Princeton University and the University of Cambridge.

A landmark collection of essays, “LBJ’s America” skillfully explores President Johnson’s seminal accomplishments―protecting civil rights, fighting poverty, expanding access to medical care and lowering barriers to immigration―as well as his struggles in Vietnam and his difficulty responding to other challenges in an era of declining U.S. influence on the global stage. Sweeping and influential, “LBJ's America” probes the ways in which the accomplishments, setbacks, controversies and crises of 1963 to 1969 laid the foundations of contemporary America and set the stage for the modern era of policy debates, political contention, distrust of government and hyper-partisanship.

Texas State is the only college in Texas to have graduated a U.S. president. Johnson began his studies in San Marcos in 1927 and received a bachelor of science and a high school teaching certificate in August 1930. Johnson’s memory remains alive on campus through the LBJ Student Center, the university’s Lyndon Baines Johnson Distinguished Lecture Series, and the LBJ Statue. In 1965, President Johnson returned to his alma mater to sign the Higher Education Act, which strengthened resources for all Americans to obtain financial support for a postsecondary education.