Publications

Welcome to the 71st edition of the Texas Almanac.  The Texas Almanac is the premier reference for everything Texas. The entire book is revised with the latest information for every edition, including the 254 county maps and our population estimates for every Texas town.

Inside you’ll find all of the latest facts and features of this great state, as well as a few feature articles, including:

COVID–19 in Texas

Dr. Ana Martinez-Catsam, professor of history at the University of Texas Permian Basin, brings us a look at how COVID–19 hit the state and impacted just about every aspect of our lives. You’ll also learn what the pandemic did to our economy and how it compares to the last major pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918.

African American Texans

The long, often heartbreaking, history of African Americans in our state began in 1582 when the first African slave, Esteban, arrived as one of the four survivors of the Cabeza de Vaca expedition. Read the rest of the history up to today, and learn how African Americans have contributed to the culture of Texas, in this feature written by Dr. Merline Pitre, professor at Texas Southern University.

Texas Wildlife

Like our cover? Then you’ll love our newly expanded section, where Dr. Travis LaDuc and Dr. Drew Davis give an overview of the five major orders: fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Following the article are lists and descriptions of common animals found in our rivers, marshes, forests, deserts, and everywhere in between!

In the spring of 1880, Ulysses S. Grant, former general-in-chief and two-term president of the United States, stepped ashore at Galveston and began what turned out to be a seven-day whirlwind visit to Texas. Because of his past accomplishments and the chance that he might be nominated to serve an unprecedented third presidential term, Grant was the most famous and eagerly awaited celebrity ever to visit the Lone Star State. The general visited Galveston, San Antonio, and Houston, where he was greeted by thousands of cheering Texans.

Grant’s visit to Texas was the subject of extensive coverage in newspapers across the nation, providing a unique time capsule for modern readers. The detailed reports of parades, banquets, receptions, and social activities not only document what Grant did at these functions, but also provide a record of what the thousands who came to see him said and did. The elaborate banquet menus and the word-by-word transcriptions of after-dinner toasts and speeches provide a fascinating window into social activities that are no longer an active part of modern life.

This book tells the story of Grant’s busy week in Texas, allowing the reader to see Texas the way Grant experienced it. The book also includes a tour guide that will allow readers to literally retrace the general’s footsteps to the sites of many historic buildings that still exist today.

The 70th edition of the Texas Almanac 2020-2021: filled to the brim with maps, statistics, photographs, and Texas facts! You’ll learn more than you expected about our great state. Featured articles in the Texas Almanac include “Texas Population: Still Growing & Increasingly Diverse” and “Asian Indians in Texas”. Find the latest data in every chapter of this long-running reference guide. From the environment, weather, recreation, population, to elections, government, arts & culture, sports. The Texas Almanac – The Source for All Things Texas Since 1857!

"Inside the Texas Revolution: The Enigmatic Memoir of Herman Ehrenberg will be of profound and enduring interest to specialists in the field, and will also likely attract a readership among the general audience of those interested in Texas history. It must also be said that the scholarship is so sound that the book resulting from this manuscript will be just as useful to specialists fifty, seventy-five, or even one hundred years from now as it is today. The manuscript is, in that regard, timeless."

--Light Townsend Cummins, Bryan Professor Emeritus, Austin College and former State Historian of Texas

• Edited by James E. Crisp, with the assistance of Louis E. Brister.
• Translated by Louis E. Brister, with the assistance of James C. Kearney.

Herman Ehrenberg wrote the longest, most complete, and most vivid memoir of any soldier in the Texan revolutionary army. His narrative was published in Germany in 1843, but it was little used by Texas historians until the twentieth century, when the first—and very problematic—attempts at translation into English were made. Inside the Texas Revolution: The Enigmatic Memoir of Herman Ehrenberg is a product of the translation skills of the late Louis E. Brister with the assistance of James C. Kearney, both noted specialists on Germans in Texas. The volume’s editor, James E. Crisp, has spent much of the last 27 years solving many of the mysteries that still surrounded Ehrenberg’s life. It was Crisp who discovered that Ehrenberg lived in the Texas Republic until at least 1840, and spent the spring of that year as ranger on the frontier.

Ehrenberg was not a historian, but an ordinary citizen whose narrative of the Texas Revolution contains both spectacular eyewitness accounts of action and almost mythologized versions of major events that he did not witness himself. This volume points out where Ehrenberg is lying or embellishing, explains why he is doing so, and narrates the actual relevant facts as far as they can be determined. Ehrenberg’s book is both a testament by a young Texan “everyman” who presents a laudatory paean to the Texan cause, and a German’s explanation of Texas and its “fight for freedom” against Mexico to his fellow Germans—with a powerful subtext that patriotic Germans should aspire to a similar struggle, and a similar outcome: a free, democratic republic.