New Orleans and the Texas Revolution

New Orleans and the Texas Revolution
Author: Edward L. Miller
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2004-08-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781585443581

In the fall of 1835, Creole mercantile houses that backed the Mexican Federalists in their opposition to Santa Anna essentially lost the fight for Texas to the Americans of the Faubourg St. Marie. As a result, New Orleans capital, some $250,000 in loans, and New Orleans men and arms—two companies known as the New Orleans Greys—went to support the upstart Texians in their battle against Santa Anna. Author Edward L. Miller has delved into previously unused or overlooked papers housed in New Orleans to reconstruct a chain of events that set the Crescent City in many ways at the center of the Texian fight for independence. Not only did New Orleans business interests send money and men to Texas in exchange for promises of land, but they also provided newspaper coverage that set the scene for later American annexation of the young republic. In New Orleans and the Texas Revolution, Miller follows other historians in arguing that Texian leaders recognized the importance of securing financial and popular support from New Orleans. He has gone beyond others, though, in exploring the details of the organizing efforts there and the motives of the pro-Texian forces. On October 13, 1835, a powerful group of financiers and businessmen met at Banks Arcade and formed the Committee on Texas Affairs. Miller deftly mines the long-ignored documentation of this meeting and the group that grew out of it, to raise significant questions. He also carefully documents the military efforts based in New Orleans, from the disastrous Tampico Expedition to the formation of two companies of New Orleans Greys and their tragic fates at the Alamo and Goliad. Whatever their motives, Miller argues, Texas became a life-long preoccupation for many who attended that crucial meeting at Banks Arcade. And the history of Texas was changed because of that preoccupation.

Inside the Texas Revolution

Inside the Texas Revolution
Author: James E. Crisp
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 588
Release: 2021-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1625110634

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.

Continental Crossroads

Continental Crossroads
Author: Samuel Truett
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2004-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822386321

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. The U.S.-Mexico borderlands have long supported a web of relationships that transcend the U.S. and Mexican nations. Yet national histories usually overlook these complex connections. Continental Crossroads rediscovers this forgotten terrain, laying the foundations for a new borderlands history at the crossroads of Chicano/a, Latin American, and U.S. history. Drawing on the historiographies and archives of both the U.S. and Mexico, the authors chronicle the transnational processes that bound both nations together between the early nineteenth century and the 1940s, the formative era of borderlands history. A new generation of borderlands historians examines a wide range of topics in frontier and post-frontier contexts. The contributors explore how ethnic, racial, and gender relations shifted as a former frontier became the borderlands. They look at the rise of new imagined communities and border literary traditions through the eyes of Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians, and recover transnational border narratives and experiences of African Americans, Chinese, and Europeans. They also show how surveillance and resistance in the borderlands inflected the “body politics” of gender, race, and nation. Native heroine Bárbara Gandiaga, Mexican traveler Ignacio Martínez, Kiowa warrior Sloping Hair, African American colonist William H. Ellis, Chinese merchant Lee Sing, and a diverse cast of politicos and subalterns, gendarmes and patrolmen, and insurrectos and exiles add transnational drama to the formerly divided worlds of Mexican and U.S. history. Contributors. Grace Peña Delgado, Karl Jacoby, Benjamin Johnson, Louise Pubols, Raúl Ramos, Andrés Reséndez, Bárbara O. Reyes, Alexandra Minna Stern, Samuel Truett, Elliott Young

Unruly Waters

Unruly Waters
Author: Kenna Lang Archer
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826355889

Running more than 1,200 miles from headwaters in eastern New Mexico through the middle of Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, the Brazos River has frustrated developers for nearly two centuries. This environmental history of the Brazos traces the techniques that engineers and politicians have repeatedly used to try to manage its flow. The vast majority of projects proposed or constructed in this watershed were failures, undone by the geology of the river as much as the cost of improvement. When developers erected locks, the river changed course. When they built large-scale dams, floodwaters overflowed the concrete rims. When they constructed levees, the soils collapsed. Yet lawmakers and laypeople, boosters and engineers continued to work toward improving the river and harnessing it for various uses. Through the plight of the Brazos River Archer illuminates the broader commentary on the efforts to tame this nation’s rivers as well as its historical perspectives on development and technology. The struggle to overcome nature, Archer notes, reflects a quintessentially American faith in technology.

Soldiers of Misfortune

Soldiers of Misfortune
Author: Sam W. Haynes
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2010-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292786441

This historical study offers “a new understanding of the human cost of the [Republic of Texas’s] vainglorious attempt to attack Mexico” (Western Historical Quarterly). The Somervell and Mier Expeditions of 1842, culminating in the famous "black bean episode" in which Texas prisoners drew white or black beans to determine who would be executed by their Mexican captors, still capture the public imagination in Texas. But were the Texans really martyrs in a glorious cause, or undisciplined soldiers defying their own government? How did the Mier Expedition affect the border disputes between the Texas Republic and Mexico? What role did Texas President Sam Houston play? In Soldiers of Misfortune, Sam W. Haynes addresses this and other important historical questions. Expertly researched yet accessible and engaging, Haynes’s narrative includes many dramatic excerpts from the diaries and letters of expedition participants./DIV

A Guide to the History of Texas

A Guide to the History of Texas
Author: Light Townsend Cummins
Publisher: Greenwood
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1988-01-13
Genre: History
ISBN:

Organized in two major sections, this definitive reference work provides historical essays by leading scholars in the field and surveys of the principal archival holdings in Texas, with special emphasis on those significant to the history of the state. The essays, covering the most important chronological periods and including some special topics, offer up-to-date summaries of the major works and most significant interpretations in the historical literature, focusing on the political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual concerns of the past. The second section provides an overview of the major archives within the state, which will enable the researcher to locate primary sources. Each article is written by a historian or an archivist with special knowledge of the archives and includes an introduction to the collection, location of the archive, hours of operation, and a wealth of other useful information. There are also brief discussions of topics that might be developed for further study, from the resources of the particular archive.

The Texas Revolutionary Experience

The Texas Revolutionary Experience
Author: Paul D. Lack
Publisher:
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN:

This fresh perspective, drawn from exhaustive examination of primary documents (claims records and land documents as well as traditional manuscript collections), portrays the Texans entering their quarrel with Mexico as a fragmented people--individualistic, divided from one community to another by ethnic and racial tensions, and lacking a consensus about the meaning of political changes in Mexico. Paul D. Lack examines, one at a time, the various groups that participated in the Texas Revolution. He concludes that the army was highly politicized, overly democratic and individualistic, and lacking in discipline and respect for property. With the statistical profile of the army he has compiled, Lack puts to rest forever the idea that the Anglo community gave an overwhelming response to the call to arms. He details instead the tensions between army volunteers and the majority of Texans who refused military service.

A World Not to Come

A World Not to Come
Author: Raœl Coronado
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 574
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674073916

In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain and deposed the king. Overnight, Hispanics were forced to confront modernity and look beyond monarchy and religion for new sources of authority. Coronado focuses on how Texas Mexicans used writing to remake the social fabric in the midst of war and how a Latino literary and intellectual life was born in the New World.