Professor Emeritus, History
E-mail address: don.mabry@gmail.com
Website: http://www.historicaltextarchive.com
Donald J. Mabry is a native of Atlanta, Georgia who graduated with honors from Kenyon College, received the M.Ed. from Bowling Green State University, and the Ph.D. in history (with distinction) from Syracuse University. Before joining the faculty of Mississippi State University in 1970, he taught at St. Johns River Community College and Syracuse University. He is an internationally-recognized expert on 20th century Mexican political history, the Latin American narcotics trade, and computer communications for historians. He became a senior research fellow of the Center for International Security and Strategic Studies of Mississippi State in 1981. In 1991, he became Associate Dean, Director of the Institute for the Humanities, and Director of the Biological and Physical Sciences Research Institute of the College of Arts and Sciences. He also served as Acting Director, Center for Visual Creation and Co-Director, Center for Math and Science. He is the author or editor of eleven books and 500 articles, chapters, and reviews. Since he retired in 2003, he has been researching and writing on the history of the Jacksonville Florida Beaches. In 2006, as part of his continued scholarly efforts on that subject, he published the book, World's Finest Beach, the only history of the area, and the articles "A Man and Three Hotels" and "Neptune Was Neptune Before 1931" via the HTA Press (historicaltextarchive.com). He also published an essay on the father of Mexican President-Elect Felipe Calderon and on Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Second World War.
His historical photographs of Mexico have been published in CD-ROMs and on the World Wide Web. He has given presentations in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. Mabry has been interviewed by ABC, CBS, WBGTV-Boston, Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Mississippi Radio Network, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, and La Presencia (Bolivia). He has testified as an expert witness to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the U.S. House Subcommittees on Legislation and National Security and Justice and Agriculture, and served on a expert panel for the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. He has also published an article on the history of a Mississippi-based early rock'n'roll record company. He taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Latin American history and undergraduate courses in U.S. history.
Dr. Mabry pioneered in introducing historians to the use of the Internet for professional purposes. Don Mabry's Historical Text Archive, the first Internet-based file storage and retrieval site for historians, has won over fifty awards. The Archive has published 70 books and 676 articles in electronic form; it receives 19 million page views a year. He taught Modern Mexico, Colonial Latin America, Latin American Republics, and Computers & History courses via the World Wide Web. Dr. Mabry was also the webmaster of the College of Arts and Sciences.
He and his wife, Paula Crockett Mabry, have four grown children and two grandchildren. Paula headed the Speech and Drama Department at Starkville High School before retirement and is now an award-winning director in community theatre.
