Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Texas
In a momentous couple of years, the young United States added more than a million square miles of territory, including Texas and California.
As General Granger read the announcement in the summer of 1865 that slavery had ended, the celebration began. The date would go down in history — June 19th, soon shortened to Juneteenth.
GALVESTON, TEXAS, June 19, 1865 — A balding, brush-bearded officer in Union blue steps onto the balcony of the finest villa in this coastal town. On the plaza below, hundreds of Texans, black and white, wonder what this is all about. Major General Gordon Granger holds out a parch
The untrained soldiers who fought at the Alamo believed freedom and the struggle for a better life were worth dying for.
The Alamo
President James K. Polk expanded U.S. territory by a third by war-making and shrewd negotiating.
IN FEBRUARY 28, 1848, President James K. Polk received a visit from Ambrose Sevier of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, bearing bad news.
Cowhands careless with branding irons invited a fatal attack of lead poisoning or the nether end of a rope.
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A magnificent historical center portrays the heroic tale of the Lone Star State.
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Their trails pioneered new frontiers and colored the social, political and economic pattern of a nation.
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Its peculiarly local exuberance is nourished by rare traditions and an untamed individualism.
This Is Texas. Improbable event, incredible success, unprofitable loyalty, colossal hardship, heart-breaking failure went into its making.
He was a lieutenant in the Army of the United States: he saw no reason to sit in the back of the bus
ON JULY 6, 1944, Jackie Robinson, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant, boarded an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas.
If HBO’s 10-part The Pacific series has fired your interest in World War II’s Pacific Theater, consider visiting the newly renovated and much expanded George H. W. Bush Gallery of the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas.
What happened when an anti-Vietnam War activist met his new client - Lyndon Johnson
As an American president presides over a divisive war without an apparent end, for the second time in my life, my thoughts have been drawn back nearly four decades to another president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and his war in Vietnam.
A once-sleepy Southwestern city that has exploded into a metropolis, Austin fights to retain the best of its past.
A LIFETIME AGO, A QUIET STRANGER passed through the author’s hometown and came away with a record of both personal and national importance.
FOR HALF A CENTURY, THE PICTURES HAD BEEN POPPING UP occasionally in books or magazines—razor-sharp black-and-white images of life in our little East Texas farm town in the 30s.
What you don’t remember about the day JFK was shot
It was a series of sounds and images that had monumental impact and will always remain in the minds of those who watched: the bloodstained suit, the child saluting the coffin, the funeral procession to the muffled drums, the riderless horse.
Seen in its proper historical context, amid the height of the Cold War, the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination looks much more impressive and its shortcomings much more understandable.
If you want to visit the relic itself, you must go to San Antonio. But, to get the feel of what it was like for Crockett and Travis and the rest, you should drive west into the Texas prairie.
You can tell the difference with a single touch.
A small but dependable pleasure of travel is encountering such blazons of civic pride as “Welcome to the City of Cheese, Chairs, Children, and Churches!”
Stephen Vincent Benét confessed that he had fallen in love with American placenames, and George R.
A routine chore for JFK’s official photographer became the most important assignment of his career. Much of his moving pictorial record appears here for the first time.
It was a typical motorcade. Cecil W. Stoughton had been in many like it. A 43-year-old veteran of the Signal Corps, Captain Stoughton had so impressed John F.
During the Depression, itinerant photographers hawked their services from town to town. All we know about this one is that he passed through Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1934. And that he was very good indeed.
Only one man in town today remembers him, even vaguely, although he took 560 pictures of Corpus Christi businesses and the people in them during the month of February, 1934.
For more than 200 years, Americans have tried to change the weather by starting fires, setting off explosions, cutting trees, even planning to divert the Gulf Stream. The question now is not how to do it, but whether to do it at all.
RAIN MADE TO ORDER: PRELIMINARY EXPERIMENTS IN TEXAS PROVE SUCCESSFUL. The headline might be yesterday’s, but in fact it appeared in August 1891.
We marked the 150th anniversary of the Texas Revolution with two articles in our February issue.
The Lone Star state as it once was, proud, isolated, independent, the undiluted essence of America forever inventing itself out of the hardscrabble reality of the frontier
The Texans on these pages are a vanishing species, born of the vast and varied geography of the toughest frontier.
On the 150th anniversary of Texan independence, we trace the fierce negotiations that brought the republic into the union.
From the moment he entered the White House in March 1829, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee turned a cold and calculating eye on Texas.
A Texas Pioneer’s Unusual Gift to His City
Henry Rosenberg arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1843, a nineteen-year-old Swiss fabric apprentice with an eight-dollar-a-week job waiting for him.
The former First Lady looks back on the years with Lyndon and discusses her life today
When Lady Bird Johnson stops by the post office in Stonewall, Texas, to mail a letter, or waves to the tourists visiting the Johnson Ranch, or rides in the elevator of the LBJ Library in Austin, she is greeted with delighted smiles—sometimes of immediate reco
On the morning of March 6,1836, a band of 187 Texas revolutionaries died at the hands of some three thousand Mexican troops within the crumbling pile of stones called the Alamo.
The twentieth century blew into Texas one year and nine days late. On January 10, 1991, two veteran oilmen named Patillo Higgins and Anthony F.
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