If you know anything about Nevada’s history, there’s a good chance you learned at least some of it, and perhaps a lot of it, from James Warren Hulse. He died recently at age 92. He had an incredible life and career.
James Hulse was born in Pioche in 1930. In his heart, in many ways, he never left Lincoln County. Not only did he write a master’s thesis on it that because one of his first books. He also was a proud son, defender, and critic of rural Nevada for the rest of his life. At age 18, he moved north to Reno on a Harold’s Club scholarship to attend the university. He majored in journalism, and started writing for the Nevada State Journal even before graduating. After he did his military hitch in Europe, he returned home in 1954 as a reporter for the Journal. He walked into a big news story that was also a buzzsaw: university president Minard Stout had pushed to fire five tenured faculty for criticizing him. He also wound up trying to get Hulse fired for his coverage of these events. It didn’t work. Hulse also covered city and county government, and the state legislature.
In 1958, he graduated from the university with his master’s. He also won a fellowship to Stanford to seek a doctorate in its western traditions program, concentrating on history. He earned his Ph.D. in 1962 and published his dissertation. It was not a Nevada topic. It was called The Forming of the Communist International, published by Stanford University Press, and received excellent reviews.
After a year at a college in Washington state, Hulse returned to his alma mater. He joined the history department in 1962 and remained until retiring thirty-five years later. He taught alongside his old professors, including Russell Elliott, the dean of Nevada historians, who I took for Nevada History when I was a student. Another was Wilbur Shepperson, who specialized in European history and immigration, but turned his attention to Nevada. So did Jim Hulse.
Hulse still published in the field he was trained in. He published Revolutionists in London: A Study of Five Unorthodox Socialists and The Reputations of Socrates: The Afterlife of a Gadfly, as well as articles and reviews. But he was Nevada born and Nevada bred, and it showed.
His first book on Nevada was something long needed: A book for middle schoolers meeting the requirement to study Nevada history. The Nevada Adventure: A History was a readable guide to the past that so many Nevadans grew up with and learned from. It went through six editions. It also was used in college classes because for several years it was the only modern textbook on the state. His master’s thesis on Lincoln County appeared as a book in 1971. Lincoln County, Nevada, 1864-1909: History of a Mining Region included coverage of early Las
Vegas, since the area was part of Lincoln County from when it became part of Nevada in 1867 until the formation of Clark County in 1909. In 1974, he published the centennial history of the University of Nevada, and updated it a quarter of a century later to include the other campuses that now comprise the Nevada System of Higher Education. We’ll have more on the history of an important Nevada historian next time.