Barbara Ganson grew up in San Jose, California, but joined UT Austin as a graduate student after one of her professors recommended the university’s Latin American studies program — then, as now, considered the best in the country. She specialized in Latin American history and graduated with her master’s in 1984 and with her Ph.D. a decade later. Her first book, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata, was based on her dissertation and published in 2003. She has continued to publish on the history of Paraguay while teaching history at Florida Atlantic University for 30 years. Along the way, she’s added another specialty to her roster — aviation history — while becoming an aviator herself.
On life abroad:
I spent my junior year studying abroad in Argentina. I should have gone to Spain, but my undergraduate Spanish professor was Argentine and so I had the opportunity to go to Buenos Aires. I lived with a family that didn’t speak any English and attended classes at a time when there were no exchange programs for foreign students. It was a chaotic time, too, with transportation strikes, car bombings, and hyperinflation following the death of Juan Domingo Perón, the long-time, controversial president of Argentina.
Then I had a chance to move up-river, to Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, and continue studying. That was during the dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner, and I learned how terrible it was to live under authoritarian rule with so much corruption and concerns about human rights.
During my time abroad I experienced two different countries and cultures, and I took a lot of interest in that. Later, as a doctoral student, I developed an interest in ethnohistory, and I eventually wrote my dissertation on the Guaraní Indigenous people of Paraguay.
On watching — and studying — history unfold:
At UT I took classes with a specialist on Argentina, Dr. Thomas McGann. I was in his “Inter-American Affairs since 1890” class when the Malvinas Falklands War broke out in 1982. McGann had been a military attaché to Argentina at one time, so he had a really informative perspective. He thought the war would be over very quickly because the Argentine military wasn’t well organized strategically. The young, recruited soldiers were also unprepared and many of them died in the war, which was very devastating.
After Dr. McGann passed away, Dr. Nettie Lee Benson took over the direction of my MA thesis. She was a real institution herself — she built the Benson library at UT and was quite a personality. One day she asked me to do for Paraguay what she had done for Mexico. In a way I’ve fulfilled her request by publishing books and articles on the history of Paraguay, but I am certainly not a librarian.
On flying:
When I graduated from UT with my Ph.D., I was fortunate to get a tenure track job at Florida Atlantic University. Then I brought my mother to come live with me, and since I couldn’t travel abroad due to her declining health, I started conducting research on the history of women and early flight rather than return to the archives in Latin America. For several years I would travel to the Library of Congress and the archives of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, do research for a couple days, and then fly back to Florida. Now I’m finishing up a manuscript based on that research called Lady Daredevils: American Women and Early Flight.
While I was researching women in early flight, I decided I better learn how to fly, because I wanted to understand some of the difficulties that early aviators experienced. I started taking flying lessons, both in Florida and then in Maryland, and I finished up in Ohio. I got my license in 2008, and I acquired an airplane too. I didn’t expect to become an aircraft owner, but I bought a small fourseater aircraft, a 1965 Cessna 1-72, which I’ve restored over the years.
My big claim to fame — I only have like two minutes of it — is that in 2012 I flew across the English Channel to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the first female flight across the Channel by Harriet Quimby, America’s first licensed woman pilot. I was asked by an organization to portray Quimby on this flight, so I worked with a seamstress to recreate her flying costume — a plumcolored satin flight suit — using historic photographs and Quimby’s writings, and I got to portray her. I went over to England and a small group of women pilots joined me from France, Ireland, Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. to celebrate this historic event organized by Women of Aviation Worldwide Week. We flew across the channel together and placed a plaque in the airport at Le Touquet in France celebrating Quimby’s achievement. The BBC covered it, and there are two videos still online. It was a fun, exciting day.
When I started working on the history of aviation, there were several members in my department who frowned upon the idea. Later, however, I had the opportunity to do an exhibit for the Texas Centennial Flight at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in 2010, which was well-received. I worked on that project for about two years, flying back and forth between Florida, Texas, and Washington, D.C. I even flew over to Paris to do some archival work. Then I turned the exhibit’s content into my second book, Texas Takes Wing: A Century of Flight in the Lone Star State, which was published by UT Press in 2014.