Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas (Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 158544569X ISBN 13: 9781585445691

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press, 2006

Synopsis

The past has long fingers into the present, but they are not just the fingers of fact. How we remember the past is at least as important as the objective facts of that past. The memories used by a people to define itself have to be understood not just as (sometimes) bad history but also as historical artifacts themselves. Texas’ pasts are examined in this groundbreaking volume, featuring chapters by a wide range of scholars.

Current historians’ views of Texas in the nineteenth century and especially the significance of the Alamo as a site of memory in architecture, art, and film across the years comprise a major element of this volume. Other nineteenth-century historical events are also examined through their memorializations in the twentieth century: the construction of Civil War monuments by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, public and private Juneteenth celebrations, and the Tejano memorial on the Capitol grounds commemorating the history of Mexicans in Texas. Twentieth-century chapters include collective memories and meaning attached to the Ku Klux Klan, the significance of the civil rights movement in the eyes of different generations of Texans, and the lasting (or fading) Texan memories of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The volume editors offer these studies as a model of how Texas historians can begin to incorporate memory into their work, as historians of other regions have done. In the process, they offer a more nuanced and even a more applied version of Texas history than many of us learned in school.

About this title

About the Author:

GREGG CANTRELL is the Erma and Ralph Lowe Professor of History at Texas Christian University and the author of Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas.
ELIZABETH HAYES TURNER, an associate professor at the University of North Texas, is the author of Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880–1920.

Review:

“...an important revisionist piece of Texas history that deserves wide readership. No other book does exactly what it does, and while myth has been talked about with regard to Texas history, such a sophisticated ‘meditation’ on the complicated relationship between collective (or folk) memory and scholarly, archives-based history exists no where else in print.”--John Boles, Journal of Southern History

About this edition

• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 158544569X
• ISBN 13: 9781585445691
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 324
• Editor: Cantrell Gregg, Turner Elizabeth Hayes