The most comprehensive, best-illustrated survey of the Lone Star State-the new, updated edition of the classic text The History of Texas offers a sweeping exploration of the Lone Star State, covering its history from the pre-Columbian period, to the era of Spanish control, to nineteenth century watershed events, through the 1900s and into the new millennium. This engaging, student-friendly textbook looks at how people of diverse politics, identity, class, ethnicity, and race shaped the state's past and continue to influence its present. Recent knowledge on the political, social, and cultural history of Texas provides insights on the celebrated figures, unsung heroes, and ordinary people of the state's past. The sixth edition of this classic text has been revised and updated to reflect the latest scholarship in all fields of Texas history, among them New Indian History and cultural and gender studies. The text offers fresh perspectives on Texas history, including discussions of the Progressive Era, the Great Depression, the Second World War and post-war modernization, and the state's transition during the 1960s and into the 1980s. Revised chapters provide wide-ranging coverage of Texas in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including recent statewide and national elections and political debates. This textbook: Connects events in post-World War II Texas to the larger U.S. historical narrative Offers substantial coverage of events occurring from 1900 to 2018 Uses a chronological approach to divide chapters into easily identifiable eras Includes engaging illustrations, maps, and tables, an appendix, and inclusive lists of recommended readings Features online resources for students and instructors, including a test bank, maps, presentation slides, and more Effectively organized to better meet the needs of instructors, The History of Texas is the ideal resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in Texas history at colleges and universities across both the state and the nation.

An engaging and meticulously researched history of Texas Populism and its contributions to modern American liberalism "A work of deep research and profound wisdom that adds a critical dimension to our understanding of Populism and the American liberal tradition. It is political history at its finest."-Charles Postel, author of The Populist Vision In the years after the Civil War, the banks, railroads, and industrial corporations of Gilded-Age America, abetted by a corrupt political system, concentrated vast wealth in the hands of the few and made poverty the fate of many. In response, a group of hard-pressed farmers and laborers from Texas organized a movement for economic justice called the Texas People's Party-the original Populists. Arguing that these Texas Populists were among the first to elaborate the set of ideas that would eventually become known as modern liberalism, Gregg Cantrell shows how the group broke new ground in reaching out to African Americans and Mexican Americans, rethinking traditional gender roles, and demanding creative solutions and forceful government intervention to solve economic inequality. Although their political movement ultimately failed, this volume reveals how the ideas of the Texas People's Party have shaped American political history.

The past has long fingers into the present, but they are not just the fingers of fact. How we remember the past is at least as important as the objective facts of that past. The memories used by a people to define itself have to be understood not just as (sometimes) bad history but also as historical artifacts themselves. Texas' pasts are examined in this groundbreaking volume, featuring chapters by a wide range of scholars. Current historians' views of Texas in the nineteenth century and especially the significance of the Alamo as a site of memory in architecture, art, and film across the years comprise a major element of this volume. Other nineteenth-century historical events are also examined through their memorializations in the twentieth century: the construction of Civil War monuments by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, public and private Juneteenth celebrations, and the Tejano memorial on the Capitol grounds commemorating the history of Mexicans in Texas. Twentieth-century chapters include collective memories and meaning attached to the Ku Klux Klan, the significance of the civil rights movement in the eyes of different generations of Texans, and the lasting (or fading) Texan memories of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The volume editors offer these studies as a model of how Texas historians can begin to incorporate memory into their work, as historians of other regions have done. In the process, they offer a more nuanced and even a more applied version of Texas history than many of us learned in school. GREGG CANTRELL is the Erma and Ralph Lowe Professor of History at Texas Christian University and the author of Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. ELIZABETH HAYES TURNER, an associate professor at the University of North Texas, is the author of Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920.

Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas," has long been enshrined in the public imagination as an authentic American hero, but one who was colorless and rather remote. This book, the first major biography in more than seventy years, brings Austin's private life, motives, personality, and character into sharp focus, revealing a driven man who successfully mixed effort and cunning, idealism and pragmatism to build an illustrious career. Gregg Cantrell traces Austin's early life from his privileged boyhood as the son of the Missouri mining baron Moses Austin to his family's humiliating financial downfall after the War of 1812. He tells how in 1821 Stephen Austin inherited his father's daring plan to colonize Spanish Texas. Over the next fifteen years Austin carried out this plan with dazzling success, becoming a consummate manager, exhorter, politician, and diplomat, and playing a central role in the events that led to the Texas Revolution and the establishment of the Lone Star Republic. Within a generation, as a result largely of forces that he helped set in motion, the United States completed its drive for mastery over the North American continent.

To a large degree, the story of Texas' secession from Mexico has been undertaken by scholars. Early twentieth century historians of the revolutionary period, most notably Eugene Barker and William Binkley, characterized the conflict as a clash of two opposing cultures, yet their exclusive focus on the region served to reinforce popular notions of a unique Texas past. Disconnected from a broader historiography, scholars have been left to ponder the most arcane details of the revolutionary narrative-such as the circumstances of David Crockett's death and whether William Barret Travis really did draw a line in the sand. In Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution, five distinguished scholars take a broader, transnational approach to the 1835-36 conflict. The result of the 48th Annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, held at the University of Texas at Arlington in March, 2013, these essays explore the origins and consequences of the events that gave birth to the Texas Republic in ways that extend beyond the borders of the Lone Star State.