The Handbook of Texas

The Handbook of Texas
Author: Walter Prescott Webb
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1176
Release: 1952
Genre: Texas
ISBN:

Vol. 3: A supplement, edited by Eldon Stephen Branda. Includes bibliographical references.

Twentieth-century Texas

Twentieth-century Texas
Author: John Woodrow Storey
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2008
Genre: Texas
ISBN: 1574412450

A collection of fifteen essays which cover Indians, Mexican Americans, African Americans, women, religion, war on the homefront, music, literature, film, art, sports, philanthropy, education, the environment, and science and technology in twentieth-century Texas.

The Texas Supreme Court

The Texas Supreme Court
Author: James L. Haley
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2013-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292744587

“Few people realize that in the area of law, Texas began its American journey far ahead of most of the rest of the country, far more enlightened on such subjects as women’s rights and the protection of debtors.” Thus James Haley begins this highly readable account of the Texas Supreme Court. The first book-length history of the Court published since 1917, it tells the story of the Texas Supreme Court from its origins in the Republic of Texas to the political and philosophical upheavals of the mid-1980s. Using a lively narrative style rather than a legalistic approach, Haley describes the twists and turns of an evolving judiciary both empowered and constrained by its dual ties to Spanish civil law and English common law. He focuses on the personalities and judicial philosophies of those who served on the Supreme Court, as well as on the interplay between the Court’s rulings and the state’s unique history in such areas as slavery, women’s rights, land and water rights, the rise of the railroad and oil and gas industries, Prohibition, civil rights, and consumer protection. The book is illustrated with more than fifty historical photos, many from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It concludes with a detailed chronology of milestones in the Supreme Court’s history and a list, with appointment and election dates, of the more than 150 justices who have served on the Court since 1836.

Big Wonderful Thing

Big Wonderful Thing
Author: Stephen Harrigan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 944
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292759517

The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.

The Laws of Slavery in Texas

The Laws of Slavery in Texas
Author: Randolph B. Campbell
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2010-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292721889

The laws that governed the institution of slavery in early Texas were enacted over a fifty-year period in which Texas moved through incarnations as a Spanish colony, a Mexican state, an independent republic, a part of the United States, and a Confederate state. This unusual legal heritage sets Texas apart from the other slave-holding states and provides a unique opportunity to examine how slave laws were enacted and upheld as political and legal structures changed. The Laws of Slavery in Texas makes that examination possible by combining seminal historical essays with excerpts from key legal documents from the slave period and tying them together with interpretive commentary by the foremost scholar on the subject, Randolph B. Campbell. Campbell's commentary focuses on an aspect of slave law that was particularly evident in the evolving legal system of early Texas: the dilemma that arose when human beings were treated as property. As Campbell points out, defining slaves as moveable property, or chattel, presented a serious difficulty to those who wrote and interpreted the law because, unlike any other form of property, slaves were sentient beings. They were held responsible for their crimes, and in numerous other ways statute and case law dealing with slavery recognized the humanness of the enslaved. Attempts to protect the property rights of slave owners led to increasingly restrictive laws—including laws concerning free blacks—that were difficult to uphold. The documents in this collection reveal both the roots of the dilemma and its inevitable outcome.

Seeds of Empire

Seeds of Empire
Author: Andrew J. Torget
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2015-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469624257

By the late 1810s, a global revolution in cotton had remade the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing wealth and waves of Americans to the Gulf Coast while also devastating the lives and villages of Mexicans in Texas. In response, Mexico threw open its northern territories to American farmers in hopes that cotton could bring prosperity to the region. Thousands of Anglo-Americans poured into Texas, but their insistence that slavery accompany them sparked pitched battles across Mexico. An extraordinary alliance of Anglos and Mexicans in Texas came together to defend slavery against abolitionists in the Mexican government, beginning a series of fights that culminated in the Texas Revolution. In the aftermath, Anglo-Americans rebuilt the Texas borderlands into the most unlikely creation: the first fully committed slaveholders' republic in North America. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States, and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s.

The Knights of the Golden Circle in Texas

The Knights of the Golden Circle in Texas
Author: Randolph W Farmer
Publisher: Histria Books
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2022-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1592112293

The United States today is a divided nation and some say the country may be heading toward breakup, or possibly civil war. That has happened before and the result was disastrous. As many as 750,000 Americans perished during the Civil War. A study of the causes of our last Civil War may help to prevent another.The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) played a major role in starting the Civil War in the United States. Although intended to remain a secret organization of conspirators, it is perhaps the most well-documented conspiracy in United States history. The goal of the KGC was the creation of a new society separate from the United States dedicated to the preservation and expansion of slavery into Latin America.The KGC existed in almost every state in the Union, but nowhere was it as powerful and successful as it was in Texas. Several governors, many senators and military leaders were members, having taken an oath to support the organization and their fellow members. Most of the documents generated by the KGC were destroyed after the war ended as its members feared execution for treason. Not everything was destroyed, though. This book relies on documents created by the organization and its members that have not previously been used by researchers. Many members of this organization remained in positions of authority in state affairs after the abolition of slavery. This book goes far beyond previous published work in establishing the identities of the members of this organization who promoted and encouraged the most disastrous war in American history.Randolph W. Farmer is a native Texan from a family whose ancestors first came to Texas as early as 1817 when it was still a Spanish possession. He is the author of two previously published books on Texas history.

Single Star of the West

Single Star of the West
Author: Kenneth W. Howell
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Total Pages: 547
Release: 2017-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1574416715

Does Texas’s experience as a republic make it unique among the other states? In many ways, Texas was an “accidental republic” for nearly ten years, until Texans voted overwhelmingly in favor of annexation to the United States after winning independence from Mexico. Single Star of the West chronicles Texas’s efforts to maneuver through the pitfalls and hardships of creating and maintaining the “accidental republic.” The volume begins with the Texas Revolution and examines whether or not a true Texas identity emerged during the Republic era. Next, several contributors discuss how the Republic was defended by its army, navy, and the Texas Rangers. Individual chapters focus on the early founders of Texas—Sam Houston, Mirabeau B. Lamar, and Anson Jones—who were all exceptional men, but like all men, suffered from their own share of fears and faults. Texas’s efforts at diplomacy, and persistence and transformation in its economy, also receive careful analysis. Finally, social and cultural aspects of the Texas Republic receive coverage, with discussions of women, American Indians, African Americans, Tejanos, and religion. The contributors also focus on the extent that conditions in the republic attracted political and economic opportunists, some of whom achieved a remarkable degree of success. Single Star of the West also highlights how the Texas Republic was established on American political ideology. With the majority of the white settlers coming from the United States, this will not surprise many scholars of the era. In some cases, the Texans successfully adopted American political and economic ideology to their needs, while other times they failed miserably.

Inside the Texas Revolution

Inside the Texas Revolution
Author: James E. Crisp
Publisher: Texas State Historical Assn
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2021-10-04
Genre:
ISBN: 9781625110695

Herman Ehrenberg wrote the longest, most complete, and most vivid memoir of any soldier in the Texan revolutionary army. His narrative was published in Germany in 1843, but it was little used by Texas historians until the twentieth century, when the first--and very problematic--attempts at translation into English were made. Inside the Texas Revolution: The Enigmatic Memoir of Herman Ehrenberg is a product of the translation skills of the late Louis E. Brister with the assistance of James C. Kearney, both noted specialists on Germans in Texas. The volume's editor, James E. Crisp, has spent much of the last 27 years solving many of the mysteries that still surrounded Ehrenberg's life. It was Crisp who discovered that Ehrenberg lived in the Texas Republic until at least 1840 and spent the spring of that year as ranger on the frontier. Ehrenberg was not a historian, but an ordinary citizen whose narrative of the Texas Revolution contains both spectacular eyewitness accounts of action and almost mythologized versions of major events that he did not witness himself. This volume points out where Ehrenberg is lying or embellishing, explains why he is doing so, and narrates the actual relevant facts as far as they can be determined. Ehrenberg's book is both a testament by a young Texan "everyman" who presents a laudatory paean to the Texan cause, and a German's explanation of Texas and its "fight for freedom" against Mexico to his fellow Germans--with a powerful subtext that patriotic Germans should aspire to a similar struggle, and a similar outcome: a free, democratic republic.