On June 19 ("Juneteenth"), 1865, Union general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and issued General Order Number 3, which read, "The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere." The tidings of freedom reached the approximately 250,000 slaves in Texas gradually as individual plantation owners informed their slaves over the months following the end of the war. The news elicited an array of personal celebrations, some of which have been described in The Slave Narratives of Texas (1974). The first broader celebrations of Juneteenth were used as political rallies and to teach freed African Americans about their voting rights. Within a short time, however, Juneteenth was marked by festivities throughout the state, some of which were organized by official Juneteenth committees.

Rhodes was eighteen miles northwest of Brazoria in northwest Brazoria County. A Rhodes post office was established in 1888 and discontinued in 1890, when service was transferred to Damon Mound. The town was evidently named for Joseph A. Rhodes, its first postmaster. In 1890 the community had two general stores, a sawmill, a gin, and a population of fifty.

Southwest Research Institute, an independent, nonprofit, applied engineering and physical sciences research and development organization, is the United States's third largest applied science center, after Batelle and Stanford. The institute is eight miles west of downtown in the city limits of San Antonio. It was founded in 1947 as a public trust for charitable and educational purposes by Thomas Baker Slick, Jr., a San Antonio oilman, rancher, and philanthropist. The institute began operations on what was then a part of the Essar Ranch, a Slick family holding. The ranch headquarters, a three-story Victorian home, served as the institute's first offices and laboratories. In 1993 the institute grounds consisted of 765 acres, with more than 1.5 million square feet of floor space for laboratories, workplaces, and offices. The staff in 1988 numbered 2,600, composed of about 1,100 scientists and engineers, 1,000 technicians, and 500 administrative support personnel. The institute has program development offices in the Washington, D.C., and Detroit, Michigan, areas and in Houston. It has grown from one building in 1947 to more than 100 permanent structures. In fiscal year 1992 its gross research and development revenues were around $232 million, and its total assets slightly exceeded $187 million.

The Comanches, exceptional horsemen who dominated the Southern Plains, played a prominent role in Texas frontier history throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anthropological evidence indicates that they were originally a mountain tribe, a branch of the Northern Shoshones, who roamed the Great Basin region of the western United States as crudely equipped hunters and gatherers. Both cultural and linguistic similarities confirm the Comanches' Shoshone origins. The Comanche language is derived from the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family and is virtually identical to the language of the Northern Shoshones. Sometime during the late seventeenth century, the Comanches acquired horses, and that acquisition drastically altered their culture. The life of the pedestrian tribe was revolutionized as they rapidly evolved into a mounted, well-equipped, and powerful people. Their new mobility allowed them to leave their mountain home and their Shoshone neighbors and move onto the plains of eastern Colorado and western Kansas, where game was plentiful.

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In the spring of 1917, shortly after the United States declared war on Germany, the War Department, taking advantage of the temperate climate and newly opened Houston Ship Channel, ordered two military installations built in Harris County—Camp Logan and Ellington Field. The Illinois National Guard was to train at Camp Logan, located on the northwest outskirts of the city. To guard the construction site, on July 27, 1917, the army ordered the Third Battalion of the Black Twenty-fourth United States Infantry to travel by train with seven White officers from the regimental encampment at Columbus, New Mexico, to Houston. From the outset, the Black contingent faced racial discrimination when they received passes to go into the city. A majority of the men had been raised in the South and were familiar with segregation, but as army servicemen they expected equal treatment. Those individuals responsible for keeping order, especially the police, streetcar conductors, and public officials, viewed the presence of Black soldiers as a threat to racial harmony. Many Houstonians thought that if the Black soldiers were shown the same respect as White soldiers, Black residents of the city might come to expect similar treatment. Black soldiers were willing to abide by the legal restrictions imposed by segregated practices, but they resented the manner in which the laws were enforced. They disliked having to stand in the rear of streetcars when vacant seats were available in the "White" section and resented the racial slurs hurled at them by White laborers at Camp Logan. Some police officers regularly harassed African Americans, both soldiers and civilians. Most Black Houstonians concealed their hostility and endured the abuse, but a number of Black soldiers openly expressed their resentment. The police recognized the plight of the enlisted men, but did little to alert civil authorities to the growing tensions. When they sought ways to keep the enlisted men at the camp, the Blacks disliked this exchange of their freedom for racial peace.

The strong Texas interest in flags is shown in public and private displays of the "Six Flags Over Texas," i.e., the flags of the six countries that have ruled over Texas: the Kingdom of France, the Kingdom of Spain, the Mexican Federal Republic, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States of America, and the United States of America. Spain has had four significant flags during its occupation of the New World. The royal banner of Castile and León, bearing two lions and two castles, was used as a state flag and ensign from around 1230 to around 1516. From 1516 to May 28, 1785, Spain used a state flag and ensign consisting of a modified red saltire on white to signify the house of Burgundy. A variant of the state flag and ensign 1580 to 1640 depicted the complete Spanish coat of arms on a white field. King Charles III established the familiar Spanish flag, with horizontal stripes of red-gold-red and the simple arms of Castile and León as the Spanish ensign, effective on May 28, 1785, and as the Spanish state flag on land, effective March 8, 1793. These flags were used until April 27, 1931.

Bonnie Parker, outlaw partner of Clyde Barrow, was born at Rowena, Texas, on October 1, 1910, to Henry and Emma Parker. She had an older brother, Hubert (Buster), and a younger sister, Billie. Her father, a bricklayer, died in 1914, and Emma Parker moved the family to "Cement City" in West Dallas to live closer to relatives. In the public schools Bonnie was an honor student. She enjoyed writing poetry and reading romance novels. At four-feet-ten and eighty-five pounds, she hardly looked like a future legendary criminal. In 1926 she married her longtime sweetheart, Roy Thornton. For the next several years, they suffered a tumultuous marriage; however, she refused to divorce him. Bonnie worked at Marco's Cafe in Dallas until the cafe closed in November 1929. About this time Thornton was sent to prison for a five-year sentence. Bonnie had "Roy and Bonnie" tattooed above her right knee to commemorate her marriage to Thornton.

Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Quahada Comanche Indians, son of Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, was born about 1845. According to Quanah himself, he was born on Elk Creek south of the Wichita Mountains in what is now Oklahoma, but there has been debate regarding his birthplace, and a Centennial marker on Cedar Lake northeast of Seminole, Texas, in Gaines County, claims that site as Quanah's birth location. He was a major figure both in Comanche resistance to White settlement and in the tribe's adjustment to reservation life. Nomadic hunter of the Llano Estacado, leader of the Quahada assault on Adobe Walls in 1874 (see RED RIVER WAR), cattle rancher, entrepreneur, and friend of American presidents, Quanah Parker was truly a man of two worlds. The name Quanah means "smell" or "odor." Though the date of his birth is recorded variously at 1845 and 1852, there is no mystery regarding his parentage. His mother was the celebrated captive of a Comanche raid on Parker's Fort (1836) and convert to the Indian way of life. His father was a noted war chief of the Noconi band of the Comanches. Despite his mixed ancestry, Quanah's early childhood seems to have been quite unexceptional for his time and place. In 1860, however, Peta Nocona was killed defending an encampment on the Pease River against Texas Rangers under Lawrence Sullivan Ross. The raid, which resulted in the capture and incarceration of Cynthia Ann and Quanah's sister Topasannah, also decimated the Noconis and forced Quanah, now an orphan, to take refuge with the Quahada Comanches of the Llano Estacado.

Francis Augustus Hamer, a prominent Texas Ranger, was born in Fairview, Texas, on March 17, 1884, to Franklin Augustus Hamer  and Lou Emma (Francis) Hamer. Known commonly as Frank or Pancho, he spent his early childhood on the Welch Ranch in San Saba County. In 1894 the family moved to Oxford in Llano County where Hamer worked at his father’s blacksmith shop. He attended a rural school in Oxford through approximately the sixth grade. He also personally trained himself to excel in horsemanship and marksmanship. In 1901 Hamer and his brother, Harrison Hamer, found work as wranglers on Green Berry Ketchum, Jr.’s ranch in Pecos County near Sheffield. Ketchum was a brother of outlaw Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum (see KETCHUM BOYS). In 1905 Sheriff Dudley S. Barker recommended that Hamer, who was working as a cowboy on the Carr Ranch between Sheffield and Fort Stockton, join the Texas Rangers after he captured a horse thief. On April 21, 1906, Hamer enlisted as a private in the Texas Rangers in Capt. John H. Rogers’s Company C. Working primarily along the South Texas border, Hamer became known as an expert shot and was involved in murder investigations, gambling arrests, and was part of Ranger details assigned to protect and transport prisoners, often in the midst of racially-charged environments. He left the Rangers on November 30, 1908, to become city marshal of the lawless town of Navasota, Texas. By the time Hamer resigned as marshall on April 21, 1911, he had restored a semblance of order in the town, in large part by enforcing his authority over the racist White Man’s Union that had run the town’s politics and law. While working in Navasota, Frank Hamer married Mollie Bobadillo Cameron on March 19, 1911, in Hempstead, Texas. They were divorced by early 1915.

John Wesley (Wes) Hardin, outlaw, son of James G. and Elizabeth Hardin, was born in Bonham, Texas, on May 26, 1853. His father was a Methodist preacher, circuit rider, schoolteacher, and lawyer. Hardin's violent career started in 1867 with a schoolyard squabble in which he stabbed another youth. At fifteen, in Polk County, he shot and killed a black man as a result of a chance meeting and an argument. With the Reconstruction government looking for him, he fled to his brother's house, twenty-five miles north of Sumpter, Texas, where in the fall of 1868 he claimed to have killed three Union soldiers who sought to arrest him. Within a year, he killed another soldier at Richard Bottom.

The Texas Revolution began in October 1835 with the battle of Gonzales and ended on April 21, 1836, with the battle of San Jacinto, but earlier clashes between government forces and frontier colonists make it impossible to set dogmatic limits in terms of military battles, cultural misunderstandings, and political differences that were a part of the revolution. The seeds of the conflict were planted during the last years of Spanish rule (1815–21) when Anglo Americans drifted across the Neutral Ground and the eastern bank of the Red River into Spanish territory, squatted on the land, and populated Spanish Texas. More alarming than these illegal residents, who only wanted to "settle and stay," were filibusters such as Philip Nolan, who commandeered portions of Spanish lands for personal gain and political capital. During the fading years of New Spain, its ruling council, the Cortes, worried about securing their far northern frontier and began to encourage foreign immigration to Texas, including Anglo American colonization. One who was eager to take advantage of a change in Spanish policy was Moses Austin, who received a commission from the Spanish governor of Texas to bring 300 families and establish a colony, thereby rebuilding some of his lost fortune associated with the Panic of 1819. Upon his death in 1821, his son and heir Stephen Fuller Austin fulfilled his father's vision and became the first empresario of Texas.