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‘Big Wonderful Thing’ Excerpt: “Sediciosos”
The graves of Jesus Bazán and his son-in-law Antonio Longoria are located in a small family cemetery in northwestern Hidalgo County, deep in South Texas, close to the Mexican border. There is a modern...
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‘Big Wonderful Thing’ Author Stephen Harrigan Explains Why Davy Crockett Was...
In July, as Big Wonderful Thing was being prepared for publication, the Austin author sat down with Texas A&M-College Station history professor Carlos Kevin Blanton and Texas Monthly deputy editor...
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Dallas’s Newly Reopened Holocaust and Human Rights Museum Calls Visitors to...
For 35 years, the curators and historians of Dallas’s Holocaust Museum worked to find language for unspeakable horrors. Last week, the museum reopened as the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum—a...
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JFK’s Assassination Only Grows More Distant at Dallas’s Sixth Floor Museum
The three men position themselves along the edge of Dealey Plaza, glancing up Elm Street, trying to time the traffic. This isn’t easy. Elm slopes downhill, and while local drivers know what to expect...
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The Lost Texans of the Louisiana Pines
To see the first capital of Texas, to stand on that hallowed ground, you have to leave the state. If you time your visit right, you can join the multitudes who gather for a presentation of the royal...
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What Would a Frontier-Era Explorer Take Home From Modern-Day Texas?
When nineteenth-century Americans in eastern cities like New York and Washington wanted to learn about Texas, they turned to a handful of adventurer-explorers who had traveled to the far-off region and...
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Daina Ramey Berry on the Courageous and Complex Contributions of Black Women
Subscribe Apple — Google Play — Stitcher — Spotify When University of Texas at Austin history professor Daina Ramey Berry and her coauthor, Rutgers University history professor Kali Nicole Gross,...
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The Walking Tours Tracing Dallas’s Forgotten Black History
On a chilly February morning, George Keaton stands on the city’s Ronald Kirk Pedestrian Bridge—named after the first black mayor of Dallas—addressing a crowd of two dozen people. As Keaton, the...
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In Praise of Bessie Coleman, Trailblazing Black Texan Pilot
When I was in the third grade at Kate Bell Elementary School, in Southwest Houston, my classmates and I dressed up as historical figures in honor of Black History Month. Donning a set of oversized...
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Strong as Grass: A Year After a Devastating Tornado, the Caddo Nation...
Phil Cross was ten or twelve years old when he first heard his elders reminisce about the grass houses their people used to live in. Cross was transfixed. The old structures looked sort of like...
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The Pandemic Is Threatening to Close McAllen’s Historic Cine El Rey Forever
If you ask people who work at McAllen’s Cine El Rey what they do for a living, they’ll tell you that they “make dreams come true.” For the last 73 years, dreamers have walked up to the theater and...
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The Damning History Behind UT’s ‘The Eyes of Texas’ Song
On June 4, after one of their first in-person practices since the coronavirus outbreak, the Texas Longhorns football team lined up outside Darrell K Royal—Texas Memorial Stadium and began to march...
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“A Watershed Moment”: How Scholarship and Activism Finally Toppled a Texas...
Towering twelve feet tall with a hand extended palm down as if trying to pacify a crowd, the bronze statue of Texas Ranger Captain E.J. “Jay” Banks has greeted visitors to Dallas Love Field airport...
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Why Texas Still Celebrates Confederate Heroes Day
One of Texas’s most enduring memorials to the Confederacy isn’t a statue cast in bronze or a plaque dedicated to the Lost Cause. It’s a state holiday the Texas Legislature created in 1973, more than...
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Remembering Reginald Moore, the Activist Who Uncovered Sugar Land’s Dark Past
When I first met him in 2016, Reginald Moore was deeply frustrated. The retired longshoreman had spent much of the previous two decades trying—without much success—to bring attention to the brutal...
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How Wealthy Texans Helped Create Joe McCarthy
Every demagogue needs enablers to help him grab power and hold on to it. In Senator Joe McCarthy’s case, newly unveiled records suggest that his most generous benefactors had Texas postal codes. That...
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The ‘Country Queers’ Podcast Challenges Preconceptions About Rural Areas
Rae Garringer, 35, describes the rural sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia they grew up on as “one of the most beautiful places” they’ve ever seen. “As a small kid growing up there, it’s just...
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The Statues Are Coming Down. Maybe That’s a Missed Opportunity.
Statues, the best of them, have a puzzling power. They cast a spell of stillness. The placid, unassertive way a bronze figure stands there, gazing out at some middle distance, creates an illusion that...
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Remember That Time a Nuclear Weapons Bunker Blew Up in San Antonio?
On the clear, cool morning of November 13, 1963, a convoy flanked by blue Air Force police cars with flashing lights turned off the tarmac at Kelly Air Force Base, southwest of downtown San Antonio. It...
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Olympic Protester Tommie Smith Reclaims His Legacy in a New Documentary
On October 17, 1968, American track-and-field athlete Tommie Smith won the gold medal for the 200-meter dash at the Olympics in Mexico City. As he took the podium and the National Anthem played, he and...
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Texans You Should Know: How a Black Cowboy’s Discovery Changed the Field of...
On the evening of August 27, 1908, dark clouds gathered over the Dry Cimarron River along the New Mexico–Colorado border. Sarah Rooke, the phone operator in Folsom, New Mexico, called as many people as...
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What Happened at Pease River Wasn’t a Battle. It Was a Massacre.
Early accounts of the Battle of Pease River read like Hollywood film treatments from the fifties. A dashing young hero, Sul Ross, led a small force of Texas Rangers, U.S. cavalry troops, and militia...
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Until 1968, a Married Texas Woman Couldn’t Own Property or Start a Business...
Around this time of year, Louise Raggio’s three sons miss the smell of cookies wafting from the compact kitchen in their childhood home. On the minuscule counter space, she’d prepare dozens of...
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Texas’s Most Famous Historian Looks Back at His Own, Legendary Life
While working in the archives at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, the historian Michael Collins came across what he describes, somewhat...
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How Manny Guerra Shaped the Tejano Music Scene
From the crib in his childhood home, a newborn Manny Guerra listened as music poured into the room from the radio that sat on the windowsill of his family’s tamale company next door. Long before he...
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