Texas grapples with an identity crisis. One camp insists that the state’s roots in slavery, segregation, and cotton make it southern. Another argues that its Native and ranching history make it western. Outside Texas, southern and western historians who don’t know what to make of the state ignore it altogether. In his innovative settling of the question, Glen Sample Ely examines the state’s historical DNA, making sense of Lone Star identity west of the hundredth meridian and defining Texas’s place in the American West.Focusing on the motives that shape how Texans appropriate their past--from cashing in ontourism to avoiding historical realities--Ely reveals the inner workings of a multiplicity of Texas identities.

For three years during the American Civil War an oddly assorted brigade of Texans served the Confederacy in the Trans-Mississippi theater and then, for one hundred years, disappeared from history. Some five thousand men, raised largely from the communities and farmsteads of North Texas, served in cavalry and infantry units, and were commanded for part of that time by the only foreign general of the Confederacy, Prince Camille de Polignac.
This group of soldiers fought in numerous skirmishes from Missouri to Louisiana. They endured a fearfully cold winter march through Indian Territory, were bombarded by gunboat shells along the banks of the Mississippi, Ouachita, and Red Rivers, and engaged in a stand-up, no-quarter fight along Yellow Bayou. By the summer of 1864, the brigade was engaged in little fighting, and in 1865 returned to Texas, where it was disbanded in May. More than a hundred men had been killed on the battlefields, and many others had died of disease and cold. "Our trail," wrote one brigade member, "was a long graveyard."
First published in 1964 by the Texas Gulf Coast Historical Association, Alwyn Barr's study of this previously little-known brigade not only detailed an aspect of the less-studied war in the West, but also showed in stark, first-person accounts the toll of war at the level of the common fighting man.
Available again after only a limited print run in its first edition, this little masterpiece of Civil War history now includes a new preface by Barr that updates what is known of the brigade and its significance to the Trans-Mississippi campaign.

Immigrants of African descent came to Texas first as free blacks seeking opportunity under the Spanish and Mexican governments, then as enslaved people from the deep South; then after the Civil War, a new wave of immigration began. Here, Alwyn Barr considers each era, giving readers a clear sense of the challenges that faced African Texans and the social and cultural contributions they have made to the Lone Star State.

African American have lived in Texas for more than four hundred years--longer than in any other region of the United States. Beginning with the arrival of the first African American in 1528, Alwyn Barr, in "Black Texans, "examines the African American experience in Texas during the periods of exploration and colonization, slavery, Reconstruction, the struggle to retain the freedoms gained, the twentieth-century urban experience, and the modern civil rights movement. Barr discusses each period of African-American history in terms of politics, violence, and legal status; labor and economic status; education; and social life.

"Black Texans" includes the history of the buffalo soldiers and the cowboys on Texas cattle drives, along with the achievements of notable African-American individuals in Texas history, from the Estevan the explorer through legislator Norris Wright Cuney and boxer Jack Johnson to state senator Barbara Jordan. Barr carries the story up to the present day in this second edition, which includes a new preface a new chapter on the years 1970-95, and a revised index.

In the famous Brown v. the Board of Education decisions of 1954 and 1955, the United States Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" schools for black and white students were unconstitutional. Yet history records that it took more than a decade of legal battles, civil rights protests, and, tragically, violent confrontations before black students gained full access to previously white schools.

Mansfield, Texas, a small community southeast of Fort Worth, was the scene of an early school integration attempt. In this book, Robyn Duff Ladino draws on interviews with surviving participants, media reports, and archival research to provide the first full account of the Mansfield school integration crisis of 1956.

Ladino explores how power politics at the local, state, and federal levels ultimately prevented the integration of Mansfield High School in 1956. Her research sheds new light on the actions of Governor Allan Shivers--who, in the eyes of the segregationists, actually validated their cause by his political actions--and it underscores President Dwight Eisenhower's public passivity toward civil rights during his first term of office.

Despite the short-term failure, however, the Mansfield school integration crisis helped pave the way for the successful integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Thus, it deserves a permanent place in the history of the civil rights movement, which this book amply provides.

While the battles of 1836--the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto--are wellknown moments in the Texas Revolution, the battle for Bexar in the fall of 1835 is often overlooked. Yet this lengthy siege, which culminated in a Texan victory in December 1835, set the stage for those famous events and for the later revolutionary careers of Sam Houston, James Bowie, and James W. Fannin.

Drawing on extensive research and on-site study around San Antonio, Alwyn Barr completely maps the ebbs and flows of the Bexar campaign for the first time. He studies the composition of the two armies and finds that they were well matched in numbers and fighting experience--revising a common belief that the Texans defeated a force four times larger. He analyzes the tactics of various officers, revealing how ambition and revolutionary politics sometimes influenced the Texas army as much as military strategy. And he sheds new light on the roles of the Texan and Mexican commanders, Stephen F. Austin and Martin Perfecto de Cos.

As this excellent military history makes clear, to the famous rallying cry "Remember the Alamo " "Remember Goliad " should be added: "And don't forget San Antonio "

Unsure which of its legacies are true and which to embrace, Texas grapples with an identity crisis. One camp insists that the state's roots in slavery, segregation, and cotton make it southern. Another argues that its Native and ranching history make it western. Outside Texas, southern and western historians who don't know what to make of the state ignore it altogether. In his innovative settling of the question, Glen Sample Ely examines the state's historical DNA, making sense of Lone Star identity west of the hundredth meridian and defining Texas's place in the American West.Focusing on the motives that shape how Texans appropriate their past--from cashing in on tourism to avoiding historical realities--Ely reveals the inner workings of a multiplicity of Texas identities.