| Edward Everett Dale | |
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| Born | 1879 Greer County, Texas |
| Died | 1972 |
| Occupation | Professor, Historian |
| Nationality | American |
| Genres | History of Oklahoma, American History |
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Edward Everett Dale (1879–1972) 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.[1]
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Dale was born in a rural area in Keller, Texas in 1879. His father was a farmer from Greer County, Texas, where Dale lived in his youth. In 1896 the area became part of the Indian Territories (later, Oklahoma) when the United States Supreme Court resolved a land dispute over the state boundary.[1] Dale became an orphan two years later and worked as a cow rancher for several years. In his twenties he was a schoolmaster, serving at Cloud Chief and other small towns in the region, and by 1906 was a school principal in central Oklahoma despite not having a high school diploma. At age 33 he received a bachelor's degree from the University of Oklahoma, and then a masters from Harvard University (where Frederick Jackson Turner served as his thesis advisor), before returning to the University of Oklahoma to teach.[1]
Dale's thesis of Oklahoma history was that the succession of migrants (traders, military, ranchers, then pioneer farmers) 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.[1]
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.[1] 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".[1]
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.[1]