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Texans in World War II offers an informative look at the challenges
and changes faced by Texans on the home front during the Second
World War. This collection of essays by leading scholars of Texas
history covers topics from the African American and Tejano
experience to organized labor, from the expanding opportunities for
women to the importance of oil and agriculture. Texans in World War
II makes local the frequently studied social history of wartime,
bringing it home to Texas.An eye-opening read for Texans eager to
learn more about this defining era in their state's history, this
book will also prove deeply informative for scholars, students, and
general readers seeking detailed, definitive information about
World War II and its implications for daily life, economic growth,
and social and political change in the Lone Star State.
Americans have long lived with an optimistic view of their society,
what might be termed the "egalitarian idea." The antebellum South,
with its peculiar institution of Negro slavery, has stood in
general as the most likely exception to this ideal, though the
"planter vs. plain folk" debate has engaged generations of
scholars. How closely did the South approximate the "egalitarian
ideal"? And how did the South compare with the rest of the nation
in terms of economic and political arrangements?
"Wealth and Power in Antebellum Texas" investigates these questions
for a relatively young and rapidly developing part of the slave
South. Relying on quantitative evidence gathered from census
records as well as on traditional historical materials, the authors
examine all measures of the "egalitarian ideal" in the Lone Star
state. Their close analysis of wealthholding, the interplay of
economic and political relationships, and the direction and degree
of change from 1850 to 1860 reveals a high and stable level of
inequality in the distribution of wealth, a high concentration of
wealthholding in Texas towns, and clear indication that those who
held the greatest share of wealth also held the balance of
political power.
Where possible, comparisons have been made with other areas of the
United States. Surprisingly, wealth in Texas before the Civil War
was no more unequally distributed than it was elsewhere in the
country, both North and South, during the same period. The
"egalitarian ideal" may have been largely mythical in antebellum
Texas, but it seems to have been equally mythical in the nation as
a whole.
The laws that governed the institution of slavery in early Texas
were enacted over a fifty-year period in which Texas moved through
incarnations as a Spanish colony, a Mexican state, an independent
republic, a part of the United States, and a Confederate state.
This unusual legal heritage sets Texas apart from the other
slave-holding states and provides a unique opportunity to examine
how slave laws were enacted and upheld as political and legal
structures changed. The Laws of Slavery in Texas makes that
examination possible by combining seminal historical essays with
excerpts from key legal documents from the slave period and tying
them together with interpretive commentary by the foremost scholar
on the subject, Randolph B. Campbell. Campbell's commentary focuses
on an aspect of slave law that was particularly evident in the
evolving legal system of early Texas: the dilemma that arose when
human beings were treated as property. As Campbell points out,
defining slaves as moveable property, or chattel, presented a
serious difficulty to those who wrote and interpreted the law
because, unlike any other form of property, slaves were sentient
beings. They were held responsible for their crimes, and in
numerous other ways statute and case law dealing with slavery
recognized the humanness of the enslaved. Attempts to protect the
property rights of slave owners led to increasingly restrictive
laws-including laws concerning free blacks-that were difficult to
uphold. The documents in this collection reveal both the roots of
the dilemma and its inevitable outcome.
Historians have published countless studies of the American Civil
War from 1861 to 1865 and the era of Reconstruction that followed
those four years of brutally destructive conflict. Most of these
works focus on events and developments at the national or state
level, explaining and analyzing the causes of disunion, the course
of the war, and the bitt er disputes that arose during restoration
of the Union. Much less attention has been given to studying how
ordinary people experienced the years from 1861 to 1876. What did
secession, civil war, emancipation, victory for the United States,
and Reconstruction mean at the local level in Texas? Exactly how
much change-economic, social, and political-did the era bring to
the focus of the study, Harrison County: a cotton-growing,
planter-dominated community with the largest slave population of
any county in the state? Providing an answer to that question is
the basic purpose of A Southern Community in Crisis: Harrison
County, Texas, 1850-1880 . First published by the Texas State
Historical Association in 1983, the book is now available in
paperback, with a foreword by Andrew J. Torget, one of the Lone
Star State's top young historians.
Winner of the Coral Horton Tullis, Summerfield G. Roberts, and
Friends of the Dallas Public Library Awards Because Texas emerged
from the western frontier relatively late in the formation of the
antebellum nation, it is frequently and incorrectly perceived as
fundamentally western in its political and social orientation. In
fact, most of the settlers of this area were emigrants from the
South, and many of these people brought with them their slaves and
all aspects of slavery as it had matured in their native states. In
An Empire for Slavery, Randolph B. Campbell examines slavery in the
antebellum South's newest state and reveals how significant slavery
was to the history of Texas. The ""peculiar institution"" was
perhaps the most important factor in determining the economic
development and ideological orientation of the state in the years
leading to the Civil War.
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