Mary Jo O'Rear
Mary Jo O'Rear
Born in south Louisiana in 1943, Mary Jo O’Rear spent the next 23 years of her life in north Louisiana. Meeting and marrying James Lee O’Rear, she became a certified secondary teacher, received her Bachelor of Arts degree, and moved to south Texas in the mid-1960s where she and Jim raised their daughter Jessica Lee. From 1967 to 1999, she taught world history, United States history, economics, and geography in Corpus Christi middle and senior high schools, receiving a Master of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi in 1977. During that time, she served on the Texas State Advisory committee on Teacher Evaluation, on two separate Texas State Textbook Committees, and after retirement, on the state Board of Education Social Studies TEKS Review Committee. In the fall of 1999, she entered Texas A&M University—Kingsville and two years later received a Master of Arts degree in History and Political Science.
From 1999 through 2001 she was adjunct professor of U.S. History at Texas A&M University—Kingsville and, from 1999 until 2005, she held the same position at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi.
Mary Jo was Women’s History Breakfast Chair for the East Texas Historical Association, became a Fellow of that Association in October 2016, was a Board member from 2014 to 2016 and from 2017 to 2023, and served as president of ETHA from 2019-2021. The East Texas Historical Association awarded her the Ralph Steen Award in recognition of distinguished service in October 2022.
She has served several times on the Texas State Historical Association H. Bailey Carroll Award Committee, twice on the TSHA Hospitality Committee, and once on the Program Committee.
Her article, “Silver-Lined Storm: the Impact of the 1919 Hurricane on the Port of Corpus Christi,” won the Keith Guthrie Memorial Award from the Nueces County Historical Association in 2005 and the H. Bailey Carroll Award from the Texas State Historical Association in 2006. Another work, “Reckoning at the River: Unionists and Secessionists on the Nueces, 1862,” was part of The Seventh Star of the Confederacy, an anthology that won the A.M. Pate, Jr. Award for excellence in Civil War writing in December 2009.
Her book, Storm Over the Bay: The People of Corpus Christi and their Port, published by Texas A&M University Press, came out in March 2009 and was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Best Scholarly Book Award in May 2010. Two other works to which she contributed, Still the Arena of Civil War: Violence and Turmoil in Reconstruction Texas 1865-1874 and African Americans in Corpus Christi, were released in the spring of 2012. Her next book, Bulwark against the Bay: The People of Corpus Christi and their Seawall, came out in the spring of 2017, and her most recent work, Barrier to the Bays: the Islands of the Texas Coastal Bend and their Pass, was released in early 2022, also a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letter Most Scholarly Book of 2023.
