Texas history

Texas Politicians Want to Erase What Happened Between Juneteenth and Jim Crow

by Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Zachary Montz

Joshua Houston, long enslaved by Sam Houston, recognized that the collective work of securing freedom only began with the announcement of emancipation, and that teaching the state's history honestly was part of the struggle for an egalitarian society against people determined to stand against it. 

In Texas, Those Who Don't Know History... Want to Control the State's Narrative of the Past

The growing effort to diminish the power of academic historians on the Texas State Historical Association is being driven by many of the people involved in the "1836 Project" effort to distribute literature praising the white settlers of Texas as mythic heroes. 

Wealthy Texas Activist Sues President of State's Historical Association

The suit by J.P. Bryan, a retired oilman and the executive director of the private Texas State Historical Association, which produces many important educational materials, claims that the board has too many academics and is too critical of the Anglo settlers of the state. Historian Nancy Baker Jones, the TSHA President, is the principal target. 

New Exhibition Seeks to Put Complexity in the Alamo Story

A new exhibition center on the Alamo grounds has the space to display more artifacts, and a commitment to telling a more historically accurate and inclusive story of what happened in 1836. 

Prof. Trinidad Gonzalez Seeks Truth and Reconciliation from Texas Rangers

The historian at South Texas College is seeking acknowledgment by the state legislature and elected officials representing the Rio Grande Valley of the atrocities committed under the color of law by the Texas Rangers after Texas independence. 

One Historian's Journey Comes Full Circle in Her Hometown

by Annette Gordon-Reed

After Brown v. Board of Education, the schools in Conroe, Texas preserved segregation under the guise of "freedom of choice"—backed by custom and a history of racist violence. In 1964, Alfred and Bettye Jean Gordon enrolled their daughter in a previously all-white school. This year, the town named a new school for her. 

A Win in the Battle to Commemorate a Notorious Waco, TX Lynching

For decades, activists fought for public acknowledgment of the lynching of teenaged Jesse Washington in 1916. Against the current of efforts to suppress the history of racist violence, a marker was unveiled this week. Historians Patricia Bernstein, William Carrigan and James SoRelle were involved in the effort. 

Latino Activists Changed San Antonio in the 1960s

by Ricardo Romo

San Antonio in the 1960s faced many of the same challenges of cities throughout the South; its emerging Mexican American political leadership helped steer the city in a progressive direction. 

Review: Gerald Horne on the Long and Continuous American Counter-Revolution

by David Waldstreicher

Gerald Horne's radical revision of North American history puts the Texas "counterrevolution" of 1836 at the center of a long history of battles against greater equality and more widespread freedom. 

Texas Prof Wins John Lewis Award for Work Recovering History of Anti-Mexican Border Violence

Trinidad Gonzalez of South Texas College discovered his own family's connection to "la Matanza," the killing of several hundred ethnic Mexicans in the Rio Grande Valley in 1915, while researching the broader history of racist violence along the Texas-Mexico border. 

New Evidence about Texas's Porvenir Massacre

Texas Rangers orchestrated the killing of 15 unarmed Mexican men and boys in a Texas border town in 1918. Monica Muñoz Martinez describes this as part of a pattern of state-sanctioned racist violence in the state, which her organization Refusing to Forget is working to commemorate. 

Historians Evaluate the "1836 Project" Pamphlet Texas Wants to Give to All Drivers License Applicants

Historians concur that while the task of condensing the state's history into a dozen pages is a difficult task, the choices made by the state commission aim at preserving patriotic myths favored by the right. 

What "Forget the Alamo" Forgets

by James W. Russell

"Forget the Alamo" is ultimately constrained by American unwillingness to fully deal with the reality that the US forcibly stole Texas and the southwest from Mexico.

"Civil Rights in Black and Brown" Examines Texas's Forgotten Activists

Todd Moye and Max Krochmal's history of multiracial Texas activism grew out of oral history projects with their students; they realized how much of the grassroots history of civil rights struggle in the state could be lost if it weren't recorded. 

Monica Muñoz Martinez Is Setting the Record Straight on Texas’s History of Border Violence

"As a historian, when I’m researching these events of racist violence that have not been documented, I don’t know what is going to happen or what the outcome will be. It is really hard to read newspaper articles that celebrate violence."

Why Democrats are Losing Texas Latinos

A significant portion of Tejanos consider themselves white and many vote like Anglo Texans; their history shows the contingency of racial categories and the risk for Democrats of assuming demographics will substitute for political appeal. 

"Forget the Alamo" Synthesizes Revisionist Scholarship for Today's History Wars

by James Thornton Harris

Academics have long understood Texas's heroic founding myths centered on the Alamo to be cover stories for the cause of slavery and white supremacy, but they've been tenacious parts of the state's culture. A new book joins the battle as state leaders dig in to defend those myths. 

'The Myth Itself Becomes a Stand-in.' What Can the Alamo's History Teach Us About Teaching History?

by Olivia B. Waxman

Historian Raúl A. Ramos discusses the way that the myth of the Alamo has supplanted the real history, and how new state laws stand in the way of the teaching that a multiethnic Texas needs. 

Texas Republicans Rush to Guard the Alamo from the Facts

by Jason Stanford

"The Alamo myth leaves much out, most notably that Texians opposed Mexican laws that would free the enslaved workers they needed to farm cotton."

The Resurrection of Bass Reeves: Was the Real "Lone Ranger" Black?

Only recently has popular culture revived interest in Bass Reeves, one of the first Black men to serve as a US Marshal, and the scourge of Texas fugitives.