Jeffrey S. Kerr

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Bringing the General Home: A Controversial Corpse's Long Return to Austin

By Jeffrey S. Kerr / May 22, 2013

Albert Sidney Johnston wanted to come home.

From Circus Ring to Parking Lot: The Long History of Republic Square

By Jeffrey S. Kerr / April 17, 2013
Where in Austin can you go to see a physical reminder of the city’s birth? Does anything remain in our modern metropolis that greeted Texas President Mirabeau Lamar upon his triumphant 1839 entry into the city he helped create?

Tragedy in Guy Town

By Jeffrey S. Kerr / March 28, 2013
Irish stone mason James Simms observed the changes in his Austin neighborhood with trepidation. The quiet residential community around his house at the corner of Cypress (Third) and Guadalupe streets had been invaded by sin. Saloons and gambling houses proliferated and thrived. Worse though, by 1874 at least two dozen “lewd women,” or prostitutes, lived within two blocks of the Simms home.

When the Weird was Wild - Austin's Frontier History (Part 2)

By Jeffrey S. Kerr / March 15, 2013
All right, SXSW fan, ready to continue your walking tour of frontier Austin? Recall that the first leg of the tour left us at the intersection of Congress Avenue and Eighth (Hickory) Street, where in 1838 Mirabeau Lamar shot one ginormous buffalo. Did you know that a couple of years ago our current governor continued this tradition of Texas politicians gunning down wildlife by shooting a coyote during a morning run?

When the Weird was Wild - Austin's Frontier History (Part 1)

By Jeffrey S. Kerr / March 14, 2013
So you’re in town for SXSW and you somehow woke up before noon and it’s a beautiful day outside and your first must-see band doesn’t play until suppertime. What do you do? You’ve seen Mount Bonnell, Barton Springs is too cold despite what that Speedo-wearing guy in the lobby said and your credit card has to pace itself so the Domain and SoCo are out.

Ben Thompson's March Toward Death

By Jeffrey S. Kerr / February 13, 2013
At age nine he arrived with his family in New Orleans aboard the Grenada after a cross-Atlantic voyage from Liverpool, England. Five months later he and his clan settled in Austin. In 1856 the by-now thirteen-year-old youth answered a dare from his friend Joe Brown by shooting him in the backside with a small shotgun.

1940s Austin Meets Who's Who in Black America

By Jeffrey S. Kerr / February 7, 2013
Imagine a university-sponsored artist series boasting an International Peace Prize winner, a world-famous tenor, one of the 20th century's most influential poets and the first African-American to represent New York in the U.S. Congress. Where in 1944 Austin would you have gone to avail yourself of such talent?

Hope and His Dreams: The Tilley Brothers Bring Motion Pictures to Austin

By Jeffrey S. Kerr / January 11, 2013

Quick, Austin movie buffs, what was the first movie filmed in Austin that received national distribution?  Richard Linklater’s 1991 coming-of-age film "Slacker?"  Nope, too recent.  Tobe Hooper’s 1974 gorefest "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre?" You’re getting closer, but you’re still off by decades

Merry Christmas, Mr. Douglass: A Photographic History of Holidays Past

By Jeffrey S. Kerr / December 20, 2012
Snyder native Neal Douglass (1900-1983) had already spent time with several newspapers when he hired on with the Austin American-Statesman in 1934. A year later he found himself attending a six-week crash course in photography at the University of Texas. After all, if he was to succeed as the first chief of the American-Statesman’s new photography department, he would have to know his way around a camera.

Bring Me a Bicycle Rifle, Santa! Xmas 1897-Style

By Jeffrey S. Kerr / December 14, 2012

Well, you’ve just returned from a rough day on the job at Butler’s Brickyard or Wenzel’s Cigar Factory, kicked off your boots and settled into your favorite chair.  You light your cigar (because lung cancer hasn’t been invented yet) and open the December 16, 1897 edition of the Austin Weekly

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Contact Jeffrey S. Kerr

Jeffrey Kerr entered Rice University in 1975 with little clue about what to do with his life. Vague plans of becoming a writer and historian soon gave way to more practical considerations and in 1984 Kerr earned his medical degree from Texas A&M University. After a residency at Wake Forest University, he moved back Texas to establish a successful pediatric neurology practice in Austin. Not long thereafter, Kerr discovered the extensive photograph collection at the Austin History Center. With a renewed passion for exploring the past, he spent the next 18 months researching, writing, and publishing his successful first book, Austin, Texas-Then and Now, which became a 2005 non-fiction finalist for the Writers League of Texas Violet Crown Award. He next tackled the fascinating story of Austin's founding in Seat of Empire, currently being prepared for publication by Texas Tech Press. The Republic of Austin, Kerr's third work, appeared via Waterloo Press in October 2010 and is now in its second printing. Kerr lives in Austin with Sharon, his wife of over 30 years. The couple is quite proud of its two children, a son at the University of Texas and a daughter at Texas Christian University.

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