Courses

David Smith

Senior Lecturer

Baylor University

Dr. David A. Smith is a senior lecturer in American history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He received his undergraduate degree from what is now Texas State University in San Marcos, and his Ph.D. in modern American history from the University of Missouri in the year 2000.
In addition to being the author of Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy (Ivan R. Dee, 2008), his columns on art, culture and politics have appeared in the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, the Dallas Morning News, the Austin American-Statesman, and the Waco Tribune-Herald. He has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, the Mars Hill Audio Journal, The Jim Bohannon Show, WNYC’s “Soundcheck,” KERA’s “Think,” WBAP’s “Mark Davis Show,” and numerous other national and regional radio shows. An avid public speaker, he has spoken to civic organizations ranging from art galleries to the Rotary Club, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, the Fort Worth World Affairs Council, and the Audie Murphy Museum. He serves on the board of directors of the Waco Cultural Arts Fest, and his book reviews have appeared in outlets from the Washington Times to the Naval War College Review.

Blog Posts

How immigration gave rise to American pop culture

May 14, 2017
|
Immigration

Looking back over the second half of the 20th century, among the observations one can make about American society is that our artistic and entertainment assumptions were increasingly dominated by pop culture as the decades passed. From the grand division of culture into high and low that solidified toward the end of the 1800s, the winner one hundred years later seems unquestionably to have been pop. Pop culture as we know it began with the age of industrialization, which for America means the years after the Civil War. Two driving forces allowed popular culture to flourish: one from the supply

The Progressive War: Woodrow Wilson and the US entry into WWI

April 6, 2017
|
History

One hundred years ago today, on April 6, 2017, the United States entered World War I. It was a difficult decision on the part of President Woodrow Wilson, but one that he believed held the potential to change the entire future of human civilization and to turn away from its bloody, destructive past. Since 1914, the war had been brutal, with a level of destruction that shocked even jaded observers, and the United States remained on the sidelines, vowing repeatedly that it had no reason to take part in the conflagration. Now, however, it was at last going to fight. The Progressive

The meaning of American populism

March 13, 2017
|
Democracy and Voting

The people had finally found their leader, a champion for those who had built the country with their hard work and yet now believed themselves to be silenced and ignored — left behind by the artificial currents of contemporary life. He would make their voices heard again. They didn’t think of themselves as angry — at least not without a good cause — but they were no longer going to go gently into that political good night. The year was 1896, and a new century loomed just four years away. They believed they had one last chance to change the errant course on which the country was set, and

Make Compromise Great Again: Arthur Schlesinger and the politics of the extreme

February 8, 2017
|
Role of Government

The 2016 presidential campaign highlighted the role of traditional and social media in pulling American political culture further out toward the edges of the political spectrum. The political center, once understood to be the common ground on which the messy but necessary compromises of democratic politics take place, has instead become a discredited dead zone, a place where only political and moral cowards are assumed to encamp, where a resolute “courage of your convictions” is believed to be absent. This lamentable situation has sent me back to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s acclaimed 1949 book,

Political parties are just shopping bags for ideas

January 11, 2017
|
Democracy and Voting

Is Donald Trump shredding the Republican Party? Some commentators marvel at the statist implications of Trump’s vow to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure projects — a vow that echoes both Obama’s stimulus package and FDR’s New Deal. Pundits tirelessly debate whether or not Trump is representative of the party he claims to lead, and the degree to which his policies are, or are not, Republican. Tacit in all this debate is the assumption that parties and their platforms ought somehow to be set in stone. But unlike ideological notions like conservative or progressive, which are relatively

A hero is worth 1,000 words

November 12, 2016
|
History

The other day I asked the students in my American history classes if any of them had ever heard the name Audie Murphy. Murphy was a WWII soldier who received every possible medal for valor. He stood atop a burning tank destroyer holding off an entire company of German soldiers, without regard for his own safety, so the rest of his men could withdraw from the battlefield with a chance to stay alive. He was one of the most celebrated American heroes of the mid-twentieth century. I was prepared for no hands to go up, but to my surprise a few did. Students weren’t exactly familiar with him, but some

How the Free Market Created Impressionism

September 6, 2016
|
History

Of all the ways in which the advancement of free markets in the age of industrialization changed society, its effects on the arts may be the least obvious. After all, the images most connected with the tumultuous second half of the Nineteenth Century are those of factories, smokestacks, and violent labor strikes, not the placid fields of wheat, gardens of water lilies, and bridges across glittering streams that are what most people associate with Impressionists, a group of artists that appeared at this time. But clichés aside, the work of famous impressionists like Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste