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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 They are provided here for reference and support of the historical content they contain.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 (126 total) Page 3 of 11

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.

Spanish Texas

Modern Texas, like Mexico, traces its beginning to sixteenth-century encounters between Europeans and Indians who contested control over a vast land. Unlike Mexico, however, Texas eventually received the stamp of Anglo-American culture, so that Spanish contributions to present-day Texas tend to be obscured or even unknown. The first edition of Spanish Texas, 1519–1821 (1992) sought to emphasize the significance of the Spanish period in Texas history. Beginning with information on the land and its inhabitants before the arrival of Europeans, the original volume covered major people and events from early exploration to the end of the colonial era.

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By Donald E. Chipman

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

The Texas Revolutionary Experience: A Political and Social History, 1835-1836

In honoring the heroic legend of the Texas Revolution, generations of scholars and Texans themselves have cleansed the revolution of its messier—and perhaps more truly revolutionary—dimensions. Focusing on the pre-existing causes of the conflict of 1835–36 and the military execution of the war, they have neglected the political turbulence, regional disharmonies, conflicts of interest, social upheaval, and racial and ethnic strife that characterized the period. This groundbreaking work on the Texas Revolution offers the first systematic analysis of the event as political and social history.

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By Paul D. Lack

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research. Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

Inside Texas: Culture, Identity, and Houses, 1878-1920

“Inside Texas: Culture, Identity and Houses, 1878–1920” is a 464 page book with 296 photos that tests and rejects the notion that Texas homes, like all things Texan, were unique and different. Over the 40 year time span covered by the book, decorating ideas nationally and in Texas went from the era of Victorianism with “all that stuff” to the spare, clean lines of the arts and crafts movement. By 1920, like Americans across the country, many Texans, especially the wealthier, were taking their decorating ideas from the new professionals – architects and designers – and their homes reflected less their own identity than the taste and eye of the decorator.

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By Cynthia A. Brandimarte

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research. Recipient of the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History.

Turn Your Eyes Toward Texas: Pioneers Sam and Mary Maverick

From Sam Maverick’s arrival in Texas to his death in 1870, he participated in many of the most momentous events of the state’s early history, including the Siege of Bexar and the defense of the Alamo. He accumulated a fabled land empire and inspired the term “maverick” to denote an unbranded calf or an independent person. Sam’s wife, Mary—by some accounts the first AngloAmerican woman to settle in San Antonio—lived through the stresses and tragedies of pioneer family life, chronicling them with emotional intensity and immediacy of detail. Together Sam and Mary founded a Texas family dynasty and contributed immeasurably to the cultural development of San Antonio.

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By Paula Mitchell Marks, Ph.D.

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

Rise of the Lone Star: The Making of Texas

Patriotic Texans have long sung the praises of their "revolutionary heroes," such as Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston. Some historians have even contributed their own encomiums, while others have cast a less romantic gaze upon Texas' past. But a complete, scholarly analysis of the persons, politics, and events that created the Republic of Texas was not among the material on Texas' so-called revolution that has been published in the last century.

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By Andreas V. Reichstein

Available for purchase at Legacy of Texas .

Recipient of the Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research.

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List of Publications (126 total) Page 3 of 11

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