Dr. Anna Lewis joined the faculty of the Oklahoma College for Women in the fall of 1917. She retired in 1956, after thirty-nine years of teaching history and serving as Chairman of the History Department.

She was born October 25, 1885 near the town of Cameron, Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory. She was of mixed-blood Choctaw descent. She entered the Tushkahoma Female Institute in 1900, and later attended Mary Connor Junior College in Paris, Texas. After attending a summer “normal school” at Jones Academy, near Hartshorne, Oklahoma, in the Choctaw Nation, she began a teaching career which included stints as teacher in the Choctaw national schools and in the public schools at Bokchito and Durant.

Four years of her early career were spent as a student and then a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her A. B. degree in 1915 and the M. A. in 1918. Her M. A. thesis at the University of California was “History of the Cattle Industry in Oklahoma, 1866-1893.” She received the Ph. D. in 1930 from the University of Oklahoma. Her Ph. D. dissertation was entitled “A History of the Arkansas River Region, 1541-1800.”