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by Eddie Michel
2012
The Texas Rangers are an iconic symbol of both Texas and the American West. As citizen soldiers and lawmen the Rangers have left an indelible mark in the annals of history and American culture. This book offers a balanced and informative history of the Ranger corps. The author integrates both the traditionalist view of the Rangers as heroic defenders of Texan liberty and justice with the revisionist scholarship of more recent historians which has exposed a darker side to the corps including instances of brutality, corruption, racism and on occasion exceptionally high levels of violence. A Breed Apart: The History of the Texas Rangers explores the history, character and development of the Texas Rangers from their creation as an irregular frontier force to their current status as highly trained and well respected agents of law enforcement. The book provides an excellent resource for any reader wishing to understand why the Texas Rangers remain such powerful historical symbols and continue to exert such fascination in the public imagination.
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Historians have debated the differences between borderlands and frontiers, but what defines a border? The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo marked the Rio Grande as the dividing line between Mexico and the United States, but it did not immediately endow the line with meaning. It was only two decades later, when transnational crime increased, that citizens stopped crossing the river for fear of violence. Though the Rio Grande marked a boundary–the line between danger and safety–it became a border only after the U.S. federal government asserted exclusive jurisdiction after violence threatened to turn into another war with Mexico. By theorizing borders and historicizing border security, this article shows how nonstate forces, such as violence, shape history.
2020, Western Historical Quarterly
2014
2013, The Martial Imagination: Cultural Aspects of American Warfare (Tx A&M)
War correspondents, fiction writers, poets, and artists both celebrated and condemned the violence that Texas Rangers exhibited during the U.S.-Mexican War. This ambiguity mirrored how many in the United States expressed qualms about the necessity of war to consummate their manifest destiny, but pro-expansionists used the Ranger mystique to re-situate violence and renovate savagery within new narratives that rendered these fighters as both representatively American and exotically Texan. Anthology article in Bryan, ed., The Martial Imagination: Cultural Aspects of American Warfare. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), 1-11, 53-70
This text is extracted from Chapter 2 of my 2015 dissertation, "Painting 'Section' or Painting Texas?: Negotiating Modernity and Identity in the Texas New Deal Post Office Murals." This chapter contextualizes the Texas Post Office murals within the rapidly changing socio-cultural environment of Texas in the late 1930s to early 1940s. Simultaneous to the Great Depression and the rising threat of fascism and war, Texas began to develop as a modern state and its people faced the usual disruptions in the social order due to modernization. Commensurate with these changes, the state's political and business leaders, and many of its most prominent cultural practitioners, utilized a variety of strategies that capitalized on existing discourses to advance a universal concept of the Ideal Texan that suppressed existing social identifications constructed on the divergent, regional development of Texas. And while the murals did not function according to those concerted efforts, they did, as representations of state, regional and local interests, at least reflect them. I therefore argue in this chapter that the Texas Post Office murals, when interpreted within their local contexts, provide insight into a shift in Texas identity from traditional local and regional affiliations to a unified, constructed conceit that issued from the state's business and political elite.
2009, Canadian Review of American Studies
2020, Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Acta Hispanica
The Texan Santa Fe Expedition was a commercial and military enterprise. It was unofficially initiated by Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, second President of the Republic of Texas, in the summer of 1841. His aim was to gain control over the lucrative Santa Fe Trail and to establish Texas jurisdiction over the area. The expedition included twenty-one wagons carrying merchandise and was accompanied by businessmen, Lamar’s commissioners, and a military escort of some three hundred volunteers. The members of the expedition expected a warm welcome by the citizens of New Mexico, but instead, were “welcomed” by a detachment of the Mexican Army. The Texans, reduced in number and broken in health and spirit, were forced to surrender, and then to march 1,600 miles from Santa Fe to Mexico City. They were held prisoners for almost a year and released only in the spring of 1842. In my paper I propose to discuss the organization, course, and consequences of the ill-fated expedition. My most important p...
2009
In the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, runaway slaves from Texas and debt peons from Northern Mexico put the new border line to an unexpected use. Aware that it separated two very different countries each sought refuge on the other side. Thus, a line intended to seal off one side form the other and keep laborers bounded in their placed served a contrary function. The flood of refugees across the border produced a guerra sorda--cold war-- between Mexico and the United States over their differing ideas of labor and race. On the ground this war of words constantly threatened to degenerated into a hot shooting war. And when runaway slaves and Mexican peons became unexpected allies, the situation only deteriorated further. Ultimately, neither Mexican nor U.S. officials could disabuse their servile laborers of the notion that the new border represented a line of liberty and that greater opportunity lay in greater mobility.
2012, Texans and War: New Interpretations of the State's Military History
In the 1830s and 1840s, Texas served as a beacon to a restless generation of American men, who sought to quell an often uneasy longing for adventure. When they crossed the Sabine, young men like John S. Brooks, Walter P. Lane, and Samuel H. Walker followed adolescent day dreams that were fraught with images of masculine renown, patriotic sacrifice, martial glory, and meaningful deaths. They traveled to Texas with the expectation that adventurous experiences would transform them from inconspicuous and inconsequential boys into exceptional and memorable American men. Anthology article in Alex Mendoza and Charles David Grear, eds., Texans and War: New Interpretations on the State’s Military History (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), 113-131
This article argues that differing political reactions to the Mexican Revolution, even before differences over World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, led to the initial fracturing of the Socialist Party in the United States during the 1910s. Texas Socialists had long been at odds with the dominant right wing of the SP headed by Victor Berger over how the party should be organized. But once Mexican revolutionaries began interacting with Texas Socialists, this fight expanded from one of internal party organizing to one over how a socialist transformation of the United States should be conducted. While the Berger wing of the SP took a noninterventionist stance toward revolutionary Mexico, the Texas SP went further in calling for the Mexican Revolution to be emulated in Texas as it also challenged their white supremacist views. Through common political struggle, many white Texas Socialists came to view Mexican Americans and Mexicans not as slavish peons but as fellow fighters.
1998, Journal of the Early Republic
2000, American Quarterly
2011
2008, Small Worlds: Method, Meaning and Narrative in Microhstory
Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State
2018, Border Folk Balladeers
1996, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos
2015, Civil War Wests Testing the Limits of the United States
A retrospective analysis of the instability of the United States and Mexico border in the North American South West.
2012
2021, ReVista
a personal narrative about the battles over how Texas history is represented, remembered, focusing on The Alamo and La Matanza in south Texas during the Mexican Revolution.
In the spring of 1836, after Texas rebels defeated the Mexican forces under Antonio López de Santa Anna, Tejanos faced a future as uncertain as the one they faced at the commencement of the Texas Revolution. With the victory at San Jacinto, these Texans of Spanish and Indian descent learned with whom their fortunes lay. Instead of suffering through the political and economic instability of Mexican regimes, Tejano communities confronted the Republic of Texas (1836-1845)—a new order that rarely defended their interests and often sought their demise. Despite the forces arrayed against them, Tejanos endured. The success and meaning of that resilience, however, varied from community to community and from individual to individual. In charting these multiple experiences, this article relies on the rich scholarship of Tejano studies and identifies the forces of exclusion that Tejanos withstood and the strategies of perseverance that they conceived during the Republic era. Article in Journal of the West, 47 (Sum 2008): 40-47
Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State
This essay explores the inner workings of defiance rhetoric by way of examining an exemplar: the famed Travis letter from the Alamo. Travis’ rhetoric of defiance serves not only to invite his audience to identify with the cause and character he constructs, but also to invite both the audience and the writer himself to garner the fortitude necessary to become a paragon of the individual his letter implicitly extols. Key to Travis’ rhetoric of defiance is the act of fusing the writer and the audience, maintaining tension between defeat and defiance messages, and appealing to deep-seated values of the American character. All three keys are contingent upon the audience’s ability and drive for consubstantiality, which are mediated through ekphrasis and symbolic convergence.
It has often been argued that the widespread Native American practice of capturing and adopting outsiders served, for some indigenous groups, as a way to recover from Euro-American–induced population decline. In this study I contend that Comanche looting expeditions, including raids in which captives were taken, resulted in Comanche deaths outnumbering the captives who were eventually assimilated. Hence, rather than compensating Comanche population decline, as is often assumed, those expeditions brought about a net population loss. I further argue that Comanches primarily seized captives to use them as laborers. A premeditated intention to capture enemies for adoption was seldom (if ever) the primary motivation for Comanche raids, which were fundamentally aimed at obtaining horses. These findings raise critical questions concerning widely accepted interpretations of Native American population decline that attribute the decline to external forces without exploring in depth the consequences of the manifold courses of action followed by Indians themselves.
Acta Hispanica
The paper analyses how the Mexican Texans (téjanos) related to the Mexican War of Independence, what role thy played in the borderland region, and why some of them decided to support the Anglo-American immigrants in their War of Independence against Mexico in 1836. The study is primarily based on the results of American historiography and the memoirs and correspondence of one of the most influential and controversial téjanos, Juan Nepomuceno Seguin. He was an outspoken critic of the centralist policies of Santa Anna, the Mexican president and supported the Texans' demand for more self-government. He fought in the regular army of Texas against the Mexicans, and after gaining independence was elected to the Senate of the new republic and twice won election as mayor of San Antonio. Then, however, as thousands of American newcomers arrived in Texas, he gradually became „a foreigner in his native land" and was forced to leave his homeland andflee to Mexico.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias
The United States’ westward expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century illustrated the political and economic forces motivating the nation’s desire to acquire additional territory. The Democratic and Whig parties advocated divergent goals for the nation’s development and territorial expansion. During this period, the United States and Mexico had contrasting success in acquiring territory. Mexico struggled to hold onto its northern territories while plagued by political instability after gaining its independence from Spain. In contrast, the United States embarked on an aggressive westward territorial expansion while enjoying continuing political stability. The Texas separatist revolt and the subsequent deteriorating diplomatic relations between the United States and Mexico led to the outbreak of the US–Mexico War, which had a major social and economic impact on the Mexican population. The terms of the treaty that ended the war held important implications for ethnic Mexicans and American Indians in the borderlands, and the conflict left enduring legacies.
On July 25, 1863, eight men were executed by Texas State Troops near the frontier settlement of Bandera, Texas. This paper examines the events leading up to the execution, the incident, its aftermath, and the historical memory of the event. I argue that the Bandera hangings reveal the difficulties experienced by Confederate and state authorities as they attempted to maintain their authority over dissidents in western Texas. After the war, the context of the Bandera incident was largely forgotten, and it became subsumed by the "Wild West" historical memory that many Texans embraced in the early-twentieth century.
German immigrants in the 19th century settled a “belt” of territory that stretched from Galveston and Houston on the east to Kerrville, Mason, and Hondo in the west, from the coastal plain in the south to the semiarid Hill Country in the north.
1993, Mester