Texas History

The Texas Rangers are an iconic symbol of both Texas and the American West. As citizen soldiers and lawmen the Rangers have left an indelible mark in the annals of history and American culture. This book offers a balanced and informative history of the Ranger corps. The author integrates both the traditionalist view of the Rangers as heroic defenders of Texan liberty and justice with the revisionist scholarship of more recent historians which has exposed a darker side to the corps including instances of brutality, corruption, racism and on occasion exceptionally high levels of violence. A Breed Apart: The History of the Texas Rangers explores the history, character and development of the Texas Rangers from their creation as an irregular frontier force to their current status as highly trained and well respected agents of law enforcement. The book provides an excellent resource for any reader wishing to understand why the Texas Rangers remain such powerful historical symbols and continue to exert such fascination in the public imagination.

From 1894 to 1934, a span of forty years that saw its parent company go from coal mining to oil drilling, the Texas Pacific Mercantile and Manufacturing Company operated and managed the various commercial and service enterprises essential to life in Thurber, Texas.

Thurber was a company town, wholly owned by the Texas and Pacific Coal Company, and the inhabitants viewed the “company store” with suspicion before and after unionization in 1903, believing it monopolistic and exploitative.  But to call the mercantile a monopoly, or a mere contrivance to exploit laborers, paints an incomplete portrait of the company store as it existed in Thurber and elsewhere.

With a keen eye for context—honed by a career in banking—Tucker reads the pages of ledgers in the same way most historians read diaries or newspapers.  In this thoroughgoing study he examines a wealth of company records, interviews, and newspaper accounts, presenting a case study not only of the microcosm of Thurber and TPM&M but of relations between labor and management in industrializing Texas, and a larger story of the complex role of the company store and company town in America.

Comic books are not only a type of reading material but also a useful educative source for various lessons. Based on this, this study aims to examine the effects of comic books on middle school students' motivation and academic success in social studies course. Quasi-experimental research design was used in the current study, in which 19 students were in experimental group and 20 students were in the control group. The data gathered by the motivation scale and the achievement test. The study lasted for three weeks in 2015-2016 educational year. Findings revealed that students, who were taught by the comic book, in the experimental group, reached significantly better achievement score and higher motivation than their counterparts, who were taught in traditional classroom environment.

East Texas has come to represent the rural ideal: a romantic representation of rurality that dates back millennia to the Roman poet Virgil (BCE 70-19) or the Hebrew story of Eden. By the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, however, the rural ideal grew increasingly appealing thanks to industrialization and urbanization. As cities and factories boomed, so did concerns about congestion, vice, immigrants, health, and the destruction of nature. Yet, as Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, "nature is medicinal," and if Americans were sick because of large cities, then escape to the countryside could provide the appropriate remedy. 1 East Texas is often cast as such a rural oasis of healthfulness and virtue. Those living within East Texas are also portrayed as "real Americans," the backbone of the Republic. This is a familiar agrarian orthodoxy that has "celebrated farmers for their supposed centrality in a good society, their political virtue, and their moral superiority." 2 Said Thomas Jefferson, "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." 3 While Jefferson only praised farmers, this view of rural superiority has expanded today to include all rural people whether farmers or not. 4 While many East Texans today embrace the rural ideal, East Texas has also simultaneously evolved to represent the rural in a negative sense. Rural can also take on connotations of life in a remote, isolated, and underdeveloped area-the backwoods/boondocks. Life in rural areas lay on the periphery of something more fully developed, stronger, more complete, and more useful (i.e., "the big city"). The big city, in this context, is cosmopolitan, modern, and forward-thinking. Conversely, those living in the rural backwoods are seen as country bumpkins or hicks, an uneducated, embarrassing, backward group who contribute to America's destructive stagnation. Rural people are stereotyped as slow-witted, feebleminded, and lacking intellectual and by implication moral refinement. Rural areas are for "an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth." 5 Despite the presence of African Americans and others, rural America is also characterized by white rednecks who want to shoot Bambi, cling to assault rifles, and worship a white Jesus. As one critic put it back in 1870, they are "Homo genus without the sapien." 6

ABSTRACT
Problem, research strategy, and findings: When Arnstein created the ladder of participation, local
gov-
ernments engaged predominately urban African-American neighborhoods through federally funded pro-
grams. Fifty years later, preservationists and heritage conservationists pursuing participatory
engagement
models in these communities find sustaining interest difficult. Absent from planning literature is
guidance
on how to ensure grassroots preservationists of color retain control during engagement. In this
study we
ask practitioners and scholars to consider the optimum approach to researching or preservation
planning
in this context. Through participatory action and ethnographic research, one of us (Roberts) helped
design a hybrid forum-style symposium dedicated to preserving historic Black settlement heritage.
As a
researcher and symposium co-planner, I documented local preservation knowledge using questionnaires
and performative storytelling while helping descendants of historic African-American settlements
identify
shared priorities and challenges. Findings suggest action researchers and preservationists must
“remix”
roles and the rungs of Arnstein’s ladder of participation to sustain and center stakeholder
involvement
when planning with marginalized communities. Remixing consists of strategically sampling, looping,
and
layering promising local knowledge with that of experts to support citizen-centered preservation
plan-
ning. By centering culturally informed planning approaches and negotiating with stakeholders,
professio-
nals can create the conditions for participation that support sustained involvement. Symposium co-
organizing and data collection catalyzed the ethical coproduction of knowledge and fostered ongoing
research and collaborative projects after study completion.
Takeaway for practice: Remixing as praxis offers a framework for engaged preservation and heritage
conservation that reinforces citizen empowerment through identification and application of
innovative
practices rooted in local knowledge. Identifying local practices that foster attachment and break
down
the hierarchy between expert and grassroots practitioners is essential to achieving praxis.

Here, a Canadian travel writer, unnamed, offers a unique and detailed foreigner's perspective as he treks from Texas to Ottawa in the first months of the Civil War. From prairies to plantations, from coast to capital, he vividly describes daily life in Texas, whether a slave funeral procession in Austin, a Methodist minister's lynching, or a woman chewing tobacco as her family and slaves travel by wagon from Georgia to San Antonio. In doing so, the Ottawan's observations offer insight into the complex racial culture and prejudices that prevailed not only in Texas and the Deep South, but as far north as Canada. His descriptions of the countryside are vivid, his views on Austin and other Texas towns informative and detailed, his perception of the paranoia and doubt throughout the South palpable, his portrayal of plantation life controversial. The Canadian's somewhat sympathetic picture of the Texas plantation system and his own racial stereotypes—of interest to a variety of historians—at times complements, at others contradicts, various historical studies of Texas slavery.

For the full book go to www.hendrickslake.com.

Myths of Spanish silver have persisted at Hendricks Lake near Tatum, Texas for over 150 years. The lake is an oxbow south of the Sabine River at the intersection of Rusk, Panola, and Harrison counties. Trammel's Trace, a 200-year-old trail and the first road to Texas from the north passed to its East.

This story is about a group of treasure hunters in the 1950s and 1960s who were determined to find that treasure.

The term "irredentist" is not typically used in reference to American ethnic groups. It comes from the Italian phrase terra irredenta, meaning “unredeemed land,” which was used originally in the late nineteenth century to refer to Italian-speaking territories under Austrian rule. However, this paper argues that "American irredentist" can describe Mexican-Americans, Native Hawaiians, Eskimos/Aleuts, and Puerto Ricans. Each of these groups is different, with a different history and a different culture, but considering them as American irredentists alters our way of looking at them and their special relationships to the United States.

In 1964, Firm Foundation editor Reuel Lemmons, for decades one of the most powerful voices in Churches of Christ, created something never before seen in the United States – a public battle over whether a state should adopt textbooks that accept evolution as fact. Although mentioned briefly in several accounts of the history of the American creationist movement, a full accounting of the 1964 Austin, Texas, textbook controversy has not taken place before now.

This paper shows that although other figures more commonly associated with broader American fundamentalism eventually became national representatives of the Texas anti-evolution movement, Lemmons and the Churches of Christ in fact led the charge in this groundbreaking moment. The paper shows how Lemmons provided the infrastructure to mount a statewide, and eventually national, campaign against the adoption of new science texts, and how his supporters leveraged resources from the newly established Creation Research Society to articulate a series of then-novel arguments describing creationism as a scientifically supported notion deserving equal time with evolution in public schools.

http://www.energyhistory.eu/en/varia/saudi-arabia-wind-deregulation-and-rise-wind-power-texas.


This article historicizes the rise of the Texas wind industry using the 2010 construction of the Roscoe Wind Farm in West Texas as a case study. This article uses records from local, state, and federal agencies as well as archival materials to argue that the rise of Texas wind power in the early twenty-first century was a product of broad deregulatory trends beginning in the 1970s. Deregulation had two impacts. First, state and federal policy decisions weakened old utilities monopolies. Second, the economic and social consequences of deregulation made locals interested in wind. Nationally, deregulation and globalization represented a sharp departure from earlier legislative methods of infrastructure management. In Texas, it hastened the decline of rural communities and eroded one mechanism for strident Texas nationalism. This morphed rural communities into unexpected wind advocates. The rise of Texas wind power suggests that the global trend toward deregulation and privatization post 1970 had a mixed impact on individuals, communities, and state cohesion.

Lewis Neatherlin's drive up the famed Texas Cattle Trail in 1876 is narrated by the cattleman himself. The diary and historian Kelley's ample footnotes and photographs make this a must for any cattle trail historian, or indeed any historian of the Old West.

In 21st century Texas, a judge's decision to recuse from a case is based on a complex set of norms, codes and procedures intended to promote impartiality. For most of the state's history, however, the sole ground for the removal of a judge from a case was not recusal for bias but disqualification based on rigid conditions set out in the Texas Constitution. This article examines the foundations and emergence of the modern concept of judicial recusal in Texas with the intent to illustrate a shift from rigid constitutional grounds to a more fluid approach based on judicial interpretation of a code of conduct. The author concludes that while Texas disqualification and recusal jurisprudence is conservative and restrained, it remains to be seen whether this restraint can continue unchanged in a post-Caperton era. The Caperton probability of bias standard has become part of the dialogue on recusal and disqualification in Texas, but Caperton-based challenges are unlikely to prevail in the near future because many members of the bench and bar share the belief that the state's judicial campaign contribution restrictions and recusal jurisprudence create a firewall against violations of the Due Process Clause. The risk, however, is that continued resistance to change may further erode public confidence in existing ethical safeguards and fall short of assuaging concerns that wealthy donors continue to exercise disproportionate influence on the judiciary.

This case study of Denton, Texas, a burgeoning, two-university metropolis birthed from a small-town history of theological white supremacy serves as analytic proof of J. Kameron Carter’s claims in 𝘙𝘢𝘤𝘦: 𝘈 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘈𝘤𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵, that the origins and sustaining theo-mythical structures of race and racism are best exposed when localized through the multifaceted lens of interdisciplinary scholarship that employs historical, genealogical, philosophical, and theological analysis over an “arc of time.”
By employing these localized interdisciplinary methodological approaches aimed at unveiling the theo-myth which underscores the modern American racial ontology, this study examines how theological white supremacy was homogenized into popular culture in Denton County Texas following the Civil War via a neo-Confederate Ku Klux Klan movement, (a distinct American phenomena beholden to the theo-mythology coined by Luther Rummel as “Ku Klux Konfederatism”), that continues its influence today through localized theo-political institutions, sociocultural systems and cultural ‘norms.’ Further, this study reveals how the same ancient theo-myth unveiled in Carter’s account of race underscores a popular Klanish culture which thrived in Denton County from the late-nineteenth century Reconstruction Era and well into the twentieth century with the rise of the Second-Generation Klan, just as it did throughout North Texas and the United States of America at large.

The mid-nineteenth century territorial growth of the United States was complex and contradictory. Not only did Mexico, Britain, and Native Americans contest U.S. territorial objectives; so, too, did many within the United States and in some cases American western settlers themselves. The notion of manifest destiny reflects few of these complexities. The authors argue that manifest destiny was a partisan idea that emerged in a context of division and uncertainty intended to overawe opponents of expansion. Only in the early twentieth century, as the United States had consolidated its hold on the North American West and was extending its power into the Caribbean and Pacific, did historians begin to describe manifest destiny as something that it never was in the nineteenth century: a consensus. To a significant extent, historians continue to rely on the idea to explain U.S. expansion. The authors argue for returning a sense of context and contingency to the understanding of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. expansion.

Published as Andrew Isenberg, and Thomas Richards, Jr., "Alternative Wests: Rethinking Manifest Destiny," Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Feb., 2017), pp. 4-17. © 2017 by the Pacific Historical Review. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by [the Regents of the University of California/on behalf of the Sponsoring Society] for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center.

According to the official version, the name of the State of Texas comes from the word tasha, which in the Caddo indigenous language, spoken by the Indians of the Hasinai nation, means "friendship." This conclusion was reached by the American historian Herbert Eugene Bolton in 1907 based on the claim that, during the 1689 expedition led by Alonso de Leon, there was a meeting between Fray Damian Massanet and some Indians who greeted them with the word techas, as Massanet wrote it, as a sign of friendship. From the study of the bibliography, we find that in 1606 this territory was already called Tejas, a fact that, by itself, invalidates the official version. Probably the name of the State of Texas has its origin in the word texa, or texo, as it was written in old Spanish. These were the names given to a very familiar, sacred tree in Spain. The Neches River was baptized at first with the name of River of the Texas because of the abundance of trees of this species that populated the river.

This paper examines the various connections between peyote and Texas, beginning with the archaeological evidence, then examining the history of the Coahuiltecan Indians and their influence on the development of the Native American Church (NAC), followed by an examination of the Texas peyote trade, its history and practices, as well as historical uses of peyote in folk remedies of the region.

This article argues that differing political reactions to the Mexican Revolution, even before differences over World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, led to the initial fracturing of the Socialist Party in the United States during the 1910s. Texas Socialists had long been at odds with the dominant right wing of the SP headed by Victor Berger over how the party should be organized. But once Mexican revolutionaries began interacting with Texas Socialists, this fight expanded from one of internal party organizing to one over how a socialist transformation of the United States should be conducted. While the Berger wing of the SP took a noninterventionist stance toward revolutionary Mexico, the Texas SP went further in calling for the Mexican Revolution to be emulated in Texas as it also challenged their white supremacist views. Through common political struggle, many white Texas Socialists came to view Mexican Americans and Mexicans not as slavish peons but as fellow fighters.

On the table spread of Adventist histories and biographies, many of the dishes have already been sampled.  Left cold on the corner of the table behind the narratives of church leaders, missions, sanitariums and other institutions, however, is the history of Adventist cookie bakeries. Adventist families like the McKees, Casons, Byrds, Dortchs, Callicotts, and Bishops have dominated commercial sweet cake and cookie baking in the South since the 1910s and found success in sweet cake baking even as the depression deepened into the 1930s.  While the culture of Adventism today is less accepting of the industry of sugar, many of those who became cookie bakers were devout Adventists and were migrating from professions in medicine and the ministry. Many had also come to cookies from other food work in sanitariums, or as farmers, or grocers. Some started baking right out of college, but very few came from a business background until the 1930s.  Commercially baked cookies were probably a healthier option that mom’s cookies in the 1910s.  It was at this pivotal moment that Adventists began migrating to cookie bakeries by the dozens. Between 1910 and 1930 there were more than one hundred Adventists who entered cookie baking. By the 1970s, another hundred had joined their ranks. These bakers were raised in and around Adventist centers of gravity, such as Battle Creek.  They were physicians, pastors, nurses, Adventist publishers, and teachers. Were they furthering the health message by selling cookies?
For the first time, oral histories have been taken with many of these bakers, their surviving families, and with the men and women who managed their baking empires.  These oral histories were conducted with more than forty subjects in cities throughout the South, from Daytona to Dallas, from to Birmingham to Winston-Salem, Rome, Savannah, Baton Rouge, Knoxville, Keene, and Chattanooga.
The author has utilized primary sources at the libraries of both Southern Adventist University and Southwestern Adventist University. The digital archives at the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventist’s Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research was also heavily utilized. College annual yearbooks and bulletins, and student records were consulted, as were the private collections of many of those interviewed for this research. Hundreds of newspapers were scoured, as were census records, city directories, and military records, and archives throughout the South.
By the 1980s most of these bakeries were gone but this culinary biography suggests that not only might these bakers have believed themselves part of the Adventist health message, but that the contemporary application of that Adventist health message is missing a few ingredients.

A few years ago the Juan Cortez archaeological site 16NA758 was recorded by the regional archaeology program of Louisiana. This historic site was attributed to Juan Cortez (often noted as John Cortes) who was listed on plat maps as the owner of the land claim in this section. It was stated to perhaps be one of his ranches or vacherie and that he was probably not a resident of the claim. In fact this land claim has a much more important history than a simple vacherie as this was possibly the home of former San Antonio resident Vicente Tarin while living in exile following the Battle of Medina in 1813.

"In River of Hope, Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez examines state formation, cultural change, and the construction of identity in the lower Rio Grande region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He chronicles a history of violence resulting from multiple conquests, of resistance and accommodation to state power, and of changing ethnic and political identities. The redrawing of borders neither began nor ended the region's long history of unequal power relations. Nor did it lead residents to adopt singular colonial or national identities. Instead, their regionalism, transnational cultural practices, and kinship ties subverted state attempts to control and divide the population.

Diverse influences transformed the borderlands as Spain, Mexico, and the United States competed for control of the region. Indian slaves joined Spanish society; Mexicans allied with Indians to defend river communities; Anglo Americans and Mexicans intermarried and collaborated; and women sued to confront spousal abuse and to secure divorces. Drawn into multiple conflicts along the border, Mexican nationals and Mexican Texans (tejanos) took advantage of their transnational social relations and ambiguous citizenship to escape criminal prosecution, secure political refuge, and obtain economic opportunities. To confront the racialization of their cultural practices and their increasing criminalization, tejanos claimed citizenship rights within the United States and, in the process, created a new identity."

The first working scientist to publish a science fiction story, John Leonard Riddel served as chief melter of the New Orleans Mint. While teaching chemistry at the Louisiana Medical College (now Tulane University), he invented the binocular microscope. Riddel made two exploratory expeditions into Texas surveying the geography, geology, and botany of the region.

En su 'Relación' (1542, 1555) --también conocida como 'Naufragios'--, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca relata que los indios avavares y mariames le contaron “una cosa muy extraña”: la historia de un brujo pequeño, barbado, misterioso, extranjero y travesti que espantaba a los indios y los sometía a intervenciones médico-mágicas. Este relato constituye—allende su clasificación como ficticio, mítico o etnográfico—una historia de terror sobre la conquista a partir de la cual podemos desleer la Relación. Pese a la diferenciación entre Mala Cosa y Cabeza de Vaca que gran parte de la crítica asume, y que la propia Relación propone, Mala Cosa no es el Otro (brujo, trampista y maléfico) del humanitario “buen conquistador” cristiano, sino la terrorífica figura que devela su extrañeza y encubierta violencia colonial. El relato indígena inicialmente parece emplazar al conquistador y conjurar su malignidad, invitando al forastero temible a hacerse curandero. Por otra parte—dadas las coincidencias recurrentes entre el relato de Mala Cosa y las subsiguientes performances de Cabeza de Vaca y sus compañeros—esta narración parece haber proveído a los cristianos signos y modelos de comportamiento que éstos habrían aplicado repetidamente en sus procedimientos médicos y en sus despliegues de intimidación mágica de los indígenas.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/revista_de_estudios_hispanicos/v048/48.3.jauregui.pdf

 They are among the most revered icons of the Texas Revolution.  These two cannons, made in Cincinnati especially for use in the struggle for independence from Mexico, served admirably as Sam Houston's only artillery in the Battle of San Jacinto.  For over a century, Texas history advocates have heatedly debated the details of these cannons.  Were they iron or brass?   Were they 4-pounders or 6-pounders?  And what happened to them?  Were they buried at Harrisburg?  Extensive archival research has revealed information that indicates the likely answers to these questions.  They were iron 6-pounders, and they were effectively used in Brownsville in the last battle of the Civil War. After this, they were given to the Mexican army in Matamoros and likely used in several battles between Imperialists and Liberals between 1865 and 1867. 
     The detailed story of the Twin Sisters, along with that of all of the other artillery used in 1836 by both sides, is included in the book titled Cannons of the Texas Revolution by James V. Woodrick, and in his blog at www.texashistorysnippets.blogspot.com

Currently, little scholarly work is present on the Beaumont Race Riot of 1943. While the Beaumont riot represents only one incident during a period of many, its significance to Southeast Texas history has not been adequately categorized. Much of the work done on the riot centers around the newspaper articles written at the time, but these accounts differ from publication to publication. The actual police and National Guard records from the incident in June 1943 do not appear at all. Focusing on police and military response, and beginning with the rape report that lit the fire of the riot, one can begin to catalogue the event into a timeline that can then be compared to the newspaper articles and first-person accounts. This chronologically organized study into the Beaumont Race Riot of 1943 might then offer a deeper insight into the events of June, 1943 from beginning to end and the clear steps that led to each shift. 
Using the resources cited above, a short summary of race riot history and the historiography of scholarship on the topic will begin the study but the bulk of the work will consist with the building of a timeline of the incident, backed by police and military reports. Newspaper articles and first-person interviews will then be added into the timeline of events to showcase the contentious nature of the time in which the riot occurred and the overall feeling of the period and the people involved.