Join us for a conversation with Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, the authors of The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas. Discussion will be followed by a Q&A with the audience. Books will be available for purchase.
The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf (OU Press, 2025)
A thoroughgoing look into a rare case where the eugenics movement “failed” in spite of its power in the United States and around the world—while still wielding a toxic influence—Phillips and Friauf’s work offers insight into the history of the LGBTQ community, abortion, and immigration policies in Texas, and persuasively argues that the long arc of eugenics history has helped shaped contemporary politics in the Lone Star State.
About the authors
A graduate of the University of North Texas, Betsy Friauf was a longtime journalist. At the Fort Worth Star-Telegram from1980 to 2007, she rose to the position of assistant metropolitan editor. After holding the position of Deputy Chief Communications Officer for the City of Fort Worth, she became a senior communications specialist for the University of North Texas Health Science Center, where she served until 2020. From 2021-2025, she served in the same position at Children’s Health hospital-Dallas. Recently, she retired. With Michael Phillips, she won the 2018 C.K. Chamberlain Award for Best Article of the Year in the East Texas Historical Journal and the 2019-2020 Texas Oral History Association Kenneth E. Hendrickson, Jr. Sound Historian Best Article Award.
Michael Phillips is a scholar of American racism, right-wing extremism, and apocalyptic religious beliefs. He covered crime as a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram before earning his Ph.D.in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. His first book, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, won the 2007 Texas Historical Commission’s prize for best book on Texas history. In 2019, he won a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Community College research fellowship to examine the history of eugenics in Texas. Phillips, and his research partner Betsy Friauf, recently authored The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas, published by the University of Oklahoma Press on June 3. After a 20-year career as a college professor, he has retired and now is an occasional guest co-host for the podcast It Could Happen Here, and comments on Texas politics and right-wing extremism on Substack at @drmphillips2001.