Publications

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.

A classic work in Texas military history, The Old Army in Texas is now available in paperback with a new foreword by Robert Wooster. U.S. Army officer and historian Thomas “Ty” Smith presents a comprehensive and authoritative single-source reference for the activities of the regular army in the Lone Star State during the nineteenth century. 

Beginning with a series of maps that sketch the evolution of fort locations on the frontier, Smith furnishes an overview with his introductory essay. The second part of this guide lists the departmental commanders, the location of the military headquarters, and the changes in the administrative organization and military titles for Texas. Part III provides a dictionary of 223 posts, forts, and camps in the state. The fourth part gives a year by year snapshot of total army strength in the state, the regiments assigned, and the garrisons and commanders of each major fort and camp. 

Supplying the only such synopsis of its kind, the guide's Part V offers a chronological description of 224 U.S. Army combat actions in the Indian Wars with vivid details of each engagement. The 900 entries in the selected bibliography of Part VI are divided topically into sections on biographical sources and regimental histories, histories of forts, garrison life, civil-military relations, the Mexican War, and frontier operations. 

The Old Army in Texas is an indispensable reference and research tool for students, scholars, and military history aficionados. It will be of great value to those interested in Texas history, especially military history and local and regional studies. This superb reference work is illustrated with a number of maps and rare photographs of the U.S. Army in nineteenth century Texas.

2021 Publication Award Winner - The Conservation Society of San Antonio

2021 Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Association Book Award Winner

"Tightly structured and fluently told, it is easily one of the best books about Texas to come out in 2020." - Michael Barnes, History and Culture Writer, Austin American-Statesman

Art Martínez de Vara’s Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840 is the first full-length biography of this important figure in Texas history. Best known as one of two Texas-born signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Ruiz’s significance extends far beyond that single event.  Born in San Antonio de Béxar to an upwardly mobile family, during the war for Mexican independence Ruiz underwent a dramatic transformation from a conservative royalist to one of the staunchest liberals of his era.

Steeped in the Spanish American liberal tradition, his revolutionary activity included participating in three uprisings, suppressing two others, and enduring extreme personal sacrifice for the liberal republican cause. He was widely respected as an intermediary between Tejanos and American Indians, especially the Comanches. As a diplomat, he negotiated nearly a dozen peace treaties for Spain, Mexico, and the Republic of Texas, and he traveled to the imperial court of Mexico as an agent of the Comanches to secure peace on the northern frontier. When Anglo settlers came by the thousands to Texas after 1820, he continued to be a cultural intermediary, forging a friendship with Stephen F. Austin, but he always put the interests of Béxar and his fellow Tejanos first.

Ruiz had a notable career as a military leader, diplomat, revolutionary, educator, attorney, arms dealer, author, ethnographer, politician, Indian agent, Texas ranger, city attorney, and Texas senator. He was a central figure in the saga that shaped Texas from a remote borderland on New Spain’s northern frontier to an independent republic.