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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 ea...
The first systematic inquiry into the Texas Rangers did not begin until 1935 with Walter Prescott Webb’s publication The Texas Rangers. Since then numerous works have appeared on the Rangers, but no volume has been published before that covers the various historians of the Rangers and their approaches to the topic. Editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss Jr. gather essays that profile individual historians of the Texas Rangers, explore themes and issues in Ranger history, and comprise archival research, biographies, and autobiographies. Several approaches in Texas historiography have influenced the writings on the Texas Rangers and serve to organize the chapters in the volume. Traditi...
Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives marks 50 years of writing and cultural production on the phenomenon of camp since Susan Sontag’s 1964 cornerstone essay “Notes on ‘Camp’.” It provides cutting-edge theory and understanding on ways to read and interpret camp through a collection of essays from historical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives. It includes varied subject areas including camp icons, stylistics periods, and important and representative texts from television, film, and literature. These essays create a scholarly conversation that understands camp as not only signifier or aesthetic but also a language, mode, and style that goes beyond its initial linguistic and semiotic guise. The contributors, representing a diverse group of established and rising scholars, explore camp as a largely queer genre that includes varying modes of understanding of desire and of the self outside a hegemonic model of heteronormativity.
Before OPEC took center stage, one state agency in Texas was widely believed to set oil prices for the world. The Texas Railroad Commission (TRC) evolved from its founding in 1891 to a multi-divisional regulatory commission that oversaw not only railroads but also a number of other industries central to the modern American economy: petroleum production, natural gas utilities, and motor carriers (buses and trucks). William R. Childs's unprecedented study of the TRC from its founding until the mid-twentieth century extends our knowledge of commission-style regulation. It focuses on the interplay between business and regulators, between state and national regulatory commissions, and among the t...
The eight essays included in this volume examine the dominant narrative of Texas history and seek to establish a record that includes both Mexican men and women, groups whose voices have been notably absent from the history books. Finding documents that reflect the experiences of those outside of the mainstream culture is difficult, since historical archives tend to contain materials produced by the privileged and governing classes of society. The contributing scholars make a case for expanding the notion of archives to include alternative sources. By utilizing oral histories, Spanish-language writings and periodicals, folklore, photographs, and other personal materials, it becomes possible ...
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What does it mean to live in the West today? Do people tend to identify with states, with regions, or with the larger West? This book examines the development of regional identity in the American West, demonstrating that it is a regionally diverse entity made up of many different wests—Great Plains, Southwest, Rocky Mountains, and more—in which American regionalism finds its fullest expression. These fourteen original essays tell how a sense of place emerged among residents of various regions and how a sense of those places was developed by people outside of them. Wrobel and Steiner first offer a compelling overview of the West's regional nature; then thirteen other rising or renowned sc...
War memorials are symbols of a community’s sense of itself, the values it holds dear, and its collective memory. They inform us more, perhaps, about the period in which the memorials were erected than the period of the war itself. Kelly McMichael, in her book, Sacred Memories: The Civil War Monument Movement in Texas, takes the reader on a tour of Civil War monuments throughout the state and in doing so tells the story of each monument and its creation. McMichael explores Texans’ motivations for erecting Civil War memorials, which she views as attempts during a period of turmoil and uncertainty—“severe depression, social unrest, the rise of Populism, mass immigration, urbanization, industrialization, imperialism, lynching, and Jim Crow laws”—to preserve the memory of the Confederate dead, to instill in future generations the values of patriotism, duty, and courage; to create a shared memory and identity “based on a largely invented story”; and to “anchor a community against social and political doubt.” Her focus is the human story of each monument, the characters involved in its creation, and the sacred memories held dear to them.