Another Texas History Book
On February 25, my book “Texas: An American History” will be published, in hard copy and as an audiobook. Why would any sane person write another take on Texas history from the dinosaurs to the 21st century?
I am hardly the first person to think of such an idea. Texas is an outsized place, identity, and idea, all at once, and has been since the nineteenth century. Little wonder, then, that it has inspired such an enthusiastic body of historical narratives, by amateurs and professionals alike: dime novels about the lives of Davy Crockett and Sam Houston . . .
. . . to widely read histories by Walter Prescott Webb, T.R. Fehrenbach, James Michener, Randolph Campbell, and James Haley; and historical fiction in print and on screen, from Edna Ferber and George Stevens’ Giant and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove to Philip Meyer’s The Son.
Many of these books are excellent, and nobody could write a general history of Texas, which has a geographic size and population that exceed those of most nations, without this larger body of work.
Popular TX histories achieve the difficult feat of patronizing Texas even as they glorify it. They focus on white Texans and on the 19th century, downplaying fascinating native and colonial histories, making a backwater and sideshow of a place that has powerfully influenced the modern world.
In some ways, I am in sync with these popular histories: Texas is a compelling, fascinating place with a past that is very much worth understanding. I’ve devoted much of my career to this history, to the point that I can see my Illinois students roll their eyes when I say the T-word.
My book gives full treatment to the classic story of Texas history, centered on the Anglo settlement of the 1820s and the revolution against Mexican rule they eventually led; I channel some of the counterintuitive findings of the last generation of scholarship on these developments.
But in other ways, my book is a departure. I pay a lot of attention to the 20th century, showing how Texans like fundamentalist preacher Frank Norris, Norma McCorvey (the Roe in Roe v. Wade), and politician Barbara Jordan changed not just the state, but the nation.
The renaissance in Indigenous history allows me to capture the power, complexity, and diversity of different Indian societies, including Coahuiltecans, Caddos, and Comanches, including the remarkable resurgence in recent decades of peoples like the Karankawa who I grew up being taught were “extinct.”
I hope this informs readers about traditional topics like the Alamo, cattle ranching, and religious conservatism; but also convinces them that Texas was critical to things that we don’t associate with it at all, like changing gender and sexual norms, personal computers, and organic food.
Take Juneteenth as an example: the celebration of emancipation, the single most important event in the history of the United States, emerged from Black Texans and followed their migrations. It is now a national holiday. Why do so few of us think of it as iconically Texan as the Alamo?
Texas history is often told as a celebration. But it has its dark chapters. Texas made me who I am and I love the place. Some of its history is awful and makes me feel angry, sad, disgusted, and even ashamed. I think that is what honest history—unlike patriotic myth—does for most readers.
Growing up in Texas and decades of studying its past went into the book's sensibility – a mix of fascination, admiration, and curiosity leavened with occasional doses of horror and sorrow. Here are the two books that influenced me the most: very different and written generations apart . . .
. . . yet both authors understand and accept that that Texas shaped who they are, and both portray a land haunted by its history. They’re honest about the brutal chapters of the past even as they see its achievements and claim its history as their own. I try to follow their lead.
“If a man couldn’t escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.... It’s not necessary to like being a Texan, or a Midwesterner, or a Jew, or an Andalusian, or a Negro, or a hybrid child of the international rich. It is, I think, necessary to know in that crystal chamber of the mind where one speaks straight to oneself that one is or was that thing, and for any understanding of the human condition it’s probably necessary to know a little about what the thing consists of.”