Reading list from HIST 2310: History of Texas
Required Texts
Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca: The Extraordinary Tale of a Shipwrecked Spaniard Who Walked Across America in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
James E. Crisp, Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas, edited by Gregg Cantrell and Elizabeth Hayes Turner (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007).
Recommended Texts
Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Course Schedule
Week 1: Course Introduction
- Moyers, “The Big Story”
Week 2: The First Texans
- Harrigan, “Tusk!”
- Hodge, “The Writing on the Wall”
- Reséndez, A Land So Strange, Selections
Week 3: Spanish Texas
- Barr, “A Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the “Land of the Tejas”
- Reséndez, A Land So Strange, Selections
- Recommended: Visit the Museum of the Coastal Bend in Victoria & Learn About La Salle, La Belle, and the Matagorda Bay Colony
Week 4: Mexican Texas
- De la Teja and Wheat, “Bexar: Profile of a Tejano Community, 1820-1832”
Week 5: The Texas Revolution
- Barker, “The Texan Declaration of Causes for Taking up Arms against Mexico”
- Lack “Slavery and the Texas Revolution”
- Crisp, Sleuthing the Alamo
Week 6: The Problems of Studying Texas History
- Crisp, Sleuthing the Alamo, continued
- Cantrell and Hayes, eds., Lone Star Pasts, selections
Week 7: The Republic of Texas
- Barker, “The Annexation of Texas”
- Douglass, “Texas, Slavery, and American Prosperity”
Week 8: Independent Indians
- Delay, “Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War”
- Gwynne, “Last Days of the Comanches,”
Week 9: Slavery & Secession
- Texas Ordinance of Secession (1861)
- Reynolds, “Reluctant Martyr: Anthony Bewley and the Texas Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860”
- Oates, “Texas under the Secessionists”
Week 10: Civil War & Reconstruction
- Woosters, “Rarin’ for a Fight: Texans in the Confederate Army”
- Cantrell, “Racial Violence and Reconstruction Politics in Texas, 1867-1868”
- Downs, “The Hidden History of Juneteenth”
Week 11: The Old West & The New South
- Miller, “Building a Populist Coalition in Texas, 1892-1896”
- Cantrell & Barton, “Texas Populists and the Failure of Biracial Politics”
Week 12: The Progressive Era
- Green, “The Texas Labor Movement 1870-1920”
- Gould, “Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democratic Politics, 1911-1921”
- Sorelle, “The ‘Waco Horror’: The Lynching of Jesse Washington”
- Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression …
Week 13: From the 1920s to the 1950s
- Dochuk, “Blessed by Oil, Cursed with Crude: God and Black Gold in the American Southwest”
- Carleton, “McCarthyism in Houston: The George Ebey Affair”
Week 14: Postwar Texas
- Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas”
Week 15: Recent History
- Spong, “That 70’s Show”
- Hart, “Little Did We Know…”
- Lithwick, “Extreme Makeover”
- Lizza, “The Party Next Time”