TSHA Community

Great publications from our members and award recipients.

These books were authored by members of TSHA or received one of TSHA’s book awards. They are provided here for reference and support of the historical content they contain.

List of Publications (119 total) Page 2 of 10

The Lipan Apaches: People of Wind and Lightning

Despite the significant role they have played in Texas history for nearly four hundred years, the Lipan Apaches remain among the least studied and least understood tribal groups in the West. Considered by Spaniards of the eighteenth century to be the greatest threat to the development of New Spain's northern frontier, the Lipans were viewed as a similar risk to the interests of nineteenth-century Mexico, Texas, and the United States.

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By Thomas A. Britten

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914

As the nineteenth century ended in Hunt County, Texas, a way of life was dying. The tightly knit, fiercely independent society of the yeomen farmers—”plain folk,” as historians have often dubbed them—was being swallowed up by the rising tide of a rapidly changing, cotton-based economy. A social network based on family, religion, and community was falling prey to crippling debt and resulting loss of land ownership. For many of the rural people of Hunt County and similar places, it seemed like the end of the world.

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By Kyle Wilkison

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

The Comanche Empire

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history.

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By Pekka Hämäläinen

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

Texas Terror

On July 8, 1860, fire destroyed the entire business section of Dallas, Texas. At about the same time, two other fires damaged towns near Dallas. Early reports indicated that spontaneous combustion was the cause of the blazes, but four days later, Charles Pryor, editor of the Dallas Herald, wrote letters to editors of pro-Democratic newspapers, alleging that the fires were the result of a vast abolitionist conspiracy, the purpose of which was to devastate northern Texas and free the region's slaves. White preachers from the North, he asserted, had recruited local slaves to set the fires, murder the white men of their region, and rape their wives and daughters. These sensational allegations set off an unprecedented panic that extended throughout the Lone Star State and beyond.

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By Donald E. Reynolds

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

The Yankee Invasion of Texas

Stephen A. Townsend carefully traces the actions—and inaction—of the Union forces from the capture of Brownsville by troops under Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks, through the advance up the coast with the help of Union Loyalists, until General Ulysses S. Grant ordered the abandonment of all of Texas except Brownsville in March 1864. Townsend analyzes the effects of the campaign on the local populace, the morale and good order of the two armies involved, U.S. diplomatic relations with France, the Texas cotton trade, and postwar politics in the state. He thoughtfully assesses the benefits and losses to the Northern war effort of this only sustained occupation of Texas.

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By Stephen A. Townsend

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border

Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border rescues an understudied episode from the footnotes of history. On September 15, 1891, Garza, a Mexican journalist and political activist, led a band of Mexican rebels out of South Texas and across the Rio Grande, declaring a revolution against Mexico’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Made up of a broad cross-border alliance of ranchers, merchants, peasants, and disgruntled military men, Garza’s revolution was the largest and longest lasting threat to the Díaz regime up to that point. After two years of sporadic fighting, the combined efforts of the U.S. and Mexican armies, Texas Rangers, and local police finally succeeded in crushing the rebellion. Garza went into exile and was killed in Panama in 1895.

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By Elliott Young

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

Texas Flags

Texas’ now-famous flag, Maberry has discovered, was not always a common sight in the state. Though it had been the national flag during the last six years of the Republic (1839–45), the original lone star flag was discarded in favor of the Stars and Stripes upon annexation in 1845. Indeed, by 1860 few Texans knew what their former national standard had looked like. During the years of secession and Civil War, Texans became reacquainted with the old flag, but they made relatively few copies of it, using the lone star emblem instead on the battle flags of the various units. When officials of the Confederacy mandated new “national” flags, Texans often modified them to reflect their own independent heritage.

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By Robert Maberry Jr.

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle

Robert Cavelier de La Salle: daring explorer, empire builder, shaper of history—and shameless schemer who abused his followers and deceived his king. In The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle, acclaimed historian Robert S. Weddle reveals how La Salle and his closest associates spun a web of secrecy and falsehood about their travels, dissembled their objectives, and put their own spin on his exploits by suppressing other would-be diarists. Weddle’s study represents a major revision of the story of La Salle and his times as they have been traditionally understood, with few of the major characters in the epic tale emerging unscathed. Even his death was misreported by survivors of the French colony in Spanish-claimed territory as they sought to save themselves.

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By Robert S. Weddle

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

Shooting the Sun: Cartographic Results of Military Activities in Texas, 1689-1892

Shooting the Sun: Cartographic Results of Military Activities in Texas, 1689-1829, like Flags along the Coast, is published by the Book Club of Texas. While the latter is a study of the charting of the coastline, Shooting the Sun focuses on the cartographic history of the Texas interior.

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By Jack Jackson

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

Flags Along the Coast

Flags along the Coast: Charting the Gulf of Mexico, 1519-1759: A Reappraisal is a limited-edition text that focuses in the first half on two maps created by Spaniards that changed the course of history in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the second half on the early history of French Louisiana. Donald E. Chipman wrote in Southwestern Historical Quarterly that Jackson's book is "based on impeccable scholarship. It is also a labor of love by one of Texas's most diversely talented historians."

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By Jack Jackson

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution

Hardly were the last shots fired at the Alamo before the Texas Revolution entered the realm of myth and controversy. French visitor Frederic Gaillardet called it a "Texian Iliad" in 1839, while American Theodore Sedgwick pronounced the war and its resulting legends "almost burlesque."

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By Stephen L. Hardin

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

Tejanos and Texas Under the Mexican Flag, 1821-1836

Historians have amply recorded the battles and the Anglo-Americans' military, economic, and political domination of the Mexican lands after 1836. But few studies have documented the reverse flow in the interchange while Anglo and Mexican co-existed under the Mexican flag in the previous years. Andrés Tijerina's book, focusing on Texas between 1821 and 1836, provides background facts for a better understanding of the exchange of land, power, culture, and social institutions that took place between the Anglo-American frontier and the Hispanic frontier during those critical years. To be sure, the dramatic shift in land and resources greatly affected the Mexican, but it had its effect on the Anglo American as well. After the 1820s, many of the Anglo-American pioneers changed from buckskin-clad farmers to cattle ranchers who wore boots and "cowboy" hats. They learned to ride heavy Mexican saddles mounted on horses taken from the wild mustang herds of Texas. They drove great herds of longhorns north and westward, spreading the Mexican life-style and ranch economy as they went. With the cattle ranch went many words, practices, and legal principles that had been developed long before by the native Mexicans of Texas--the Tejanos. In this book, Andrés Tijerina documents the two-way cultural exchange in the years under the Mexican flag. It describes the basic institutions of Tejano life and culture, and it documents their transmission to the Anglo-American frontier. The work is a foundation for the study of the early Mexican-American culture in Texas and its influence on Texans of all ethnic backgrounds.

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By Andrés Tijerina

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.