Tarleton professor elected associate fellow of Center for Great Plans Studies

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STEPHENVILLE (September 15, 2015) — Tarleton state University history professor Dr. T. Lindsay Baker recently was elected to membership as an Associate Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln.

Established in 1976, the Center exists to foster the study of the people and the environment of the Great Plains. Serving as an Associate Fellow is the highest rank the Center offers to scholars from outside the University of Nebraska.

Baker holds the W.K. Gordon Endowed Chair in History at Tarleton State University. He has written over 20 books on the history of Texas and the American West. He lived on the Great Plains for 20 years while associated with Texas Tech University in Lubbock and West Texas A&M University in Canyon. An authority on American windmills, he delivered a lecture on this topic at the University of Nebraska in September 2014, his second time to speak there.

Sparsely populated and covered with grass, the Great Plains has highly variable weather and stretches between the Mississippi Valley and the Rocky Mountains and from the Texas Panhandle northward to the prairie provinces of Canada. For 40 years Baker has investigated and written about the use of windmills to elevate water from drilled wells on the Great Plains for human and animal use. It was this study that led the board of governors of the Center for Great Plains Studies to elect him to membership as an associate fellow.

At Tarleton Baker teaches classes in history and directs the university’s W.K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas. The museum serves the public on Interstate 20 about halfway between Fort Worth and Abilene. It is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and on Sundays 1 to 4 p.m.

For more information, visit www.tarleton.edu/gordoncenter or the museum’s Facebook page.