Download or read book The Economic History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley 1820 1875 written by LeRoy P. Graf and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Bibliography for the Economic History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley 1820 1875 written by LeRoy P. Graf and published by . This book was released on 1942 with total page 791 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The US Army and the Texas Frontier Economy written by Thomas T. Smith and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventy million dollars in fifty-five years. From Texas' annexation in 1845 until the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army pumped at least that much or more into the economy of the fledgling state, a fact that directly challenges the popular heritage of Texas as the state with roots of pioneer capitalism and fervent independence. In The U.S. Army and the Texas Frontier Economy, 1845-1900, Thomas T. Smith sheds light on just who bankrolled the evolution of Texas into viable statehood. Smith draws on extensive research gathered from both government archives and Texas army posts in order to evaluate the symbiotic relationship between army quartermasters and the economy of the young state. Texas was the army's largest--and most costly--engagement, absorbing up to thirty percent of the total operating budget and channeling that currency into the commercial development of its frontier. Smith expands on historian Robert Wooster's theory that the military was engaged in an alliance with the political authority in Texas, and using documents such as army contracts for freighting, foraging, and fort leasing, he illustrates how federal fiscal activity spurred commercial growth for the citizens of Texas. Besides the obvious development of towns on the skirts of military bases and of roads between them, the establishment of military spending as a bedrock of the Texas economy and the protector of middle class interests shaped the future of the state's commercial prosperity. Writing with exceptional detail and clarity, Smith traces the emergence of the army's influence and includes analyses of information on army spending and development such as the introduction of army weather and telegraph services to the state, as well as accounts of real estate transactions involving the fort building program. Smith also accounts for army failures, maintaining that no one was truly prepared for the reality of western expansion. As an examination of the complex yet mutually beneficial economic relationship between the nation and the state, The U.S. Army and the Texas Frontier Economy, 1845-1900 is ideal for anyone interested in the early days of the state as well as in U.S. military and frontier history.

Download or read book Petra s Legacy written by Jane Clements Monday and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-28 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The matriarch of one of the most important families in Texas history, Petra Vela Kenedy has remained a shadowy presence in the annals of South Texas. In this biography of Petra Vela Kenedy, the authors not only tell her story but also relate the history of South Texas through a woman’s perspective. Utilizing previously unpublished letters, journals, photographs, and other primary materials, the authors reveal the intimate stories of the families who for years dominated governments, land acquisition, commerce, and border politics along the Rio Grande and across the Wild Horse Desert. From Petra’s early life in the landed ranchero society of northern Mexico, through her alliance with Luis Vidal—an officer in the Mexican army to whom she bore eight children—until her move to Brownsville after Vidal’s death, Petra lived in Mexico. When she moved to Texas, having taken Vidal’s name, she represented a link to the landed families of the region. Mifflin Kenedy, a steamboat captain who had first come to Texas during the Mexican War, married into her world, acquiring local respectability and stature when he took Petra as his wife. The story of their life together encompasses war, the taming of a frontier, the blending of cultures, the origin of a ranching empire, and the establishment of a foundation and trust that still endure today, giving millions to Texas through charitable gifts. An attractive woman of business acumen, strong religious convictions, and intense family loyalty, Petra Vela Kenedy’s influence through her husband and her children left a legacy whose exploration is long overdue.

Download or read book Border Contraband written by George T. Díaz and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-02-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Jim Parish Award for Documentation and Publication of Local and Regional History, Webb County Heritage Foundation, 2015 Present-day smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border is a professional, often violent, criminal activity. However, it is only the latest chapter in a history of illicit business dealings that stretches back to 1848, when attempts by Mexico and the United States to tax commerce across the Rio Grande upset local trade and caused popular resentment. Rather than acquiesce to what they regarded as arbitrary trade regulations, borderlanders continued to cross goods and accepted many forms of smuggling as just. In Border Contraband, George T. Díaz provides the first history of the common, yet little studied, practice of smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border. In Part I, he examines the period between 1848 and 1910, when the United States' and Mexico's trade concerns focused on tariff collection and on borderlanders' attempts to avoid paying tariffs by smuggling. Part II begins with the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, when national customs and other security forces on the border shifted their emphasis to the interdiction of prohibited items (particularly guns and drugs) that threatened the state. Díaz's pioneering research explains how greater restrictions have transformed smuggling from a low-level mundane activity, widely accepted and still routinely practiced, into a highly profitable professional criminal enterprise.

Download or read book Lone Star Unionism Dissent and Resistance written by Jesús F. de la Teja and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most histories of Civil War Texas—some starring the fabled Hood’s Brigade, Terry’s Texas Rangers, or one or another military figure—depict the Lone Star State as having joined the Confederacy as a matter of course and as having later emerged from the war relatively unscathed. Yet as the contributors to this volume amply demonstrate, the often neglected stories of Texas Unionists and dissenters paint a far more complicated picture. Ranging in time from the late 1850s to the end of Reconstruction, Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance restores a missing layer of complexity to the history of Civil War Texas. The authors—all noted scholars of Texas and Civil War history—show that slaves, freedmen and freedwomen, Tejanos, German immigrants, and white women all took part in the struggle, even though some never found themselves on a battlefield. Their stories depict the Civil War as a conflict not only between North and South but also between neighbors, friends, and family members. By framing their stories in the analytical context of the “long Civil War,” Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance reveals how friends and neighbors became enemies and how the resulting violence, often at the hands of secessionists, crossed racial and ethnic lines. The chapters also show how ex-Confederates and their descendants, as well as former slaves, sought to give historical meaning to their experiences and find their place as citizens of the newly re-formed nation. Concluding with an account of the origins of Juneteenth—the nationally celebrated holiday marking June 19, 1865, when emancipation was announced in Texas—Lone Star Unionism, Dissent, and Resistance challenges the collective historical memory of Civil War Texas and its place in both the Confederacy and the United States. It provides material for a fresh narrative, one including people on the margins of history and dispelling the myth of a monolithically Confederate Texas.

Download or read book Secession and the Union in Texas written by Walter L. Buenger and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of secession in the Lone Star State offers both a vivid narrative and a powerful case study of the broader secession movement. In 1845, Texans voted overwhelmingly to join the Union. Then, in 1861, they voted just as overwhelmingly to secede. The story of why and how that happened is filled with colorful characters, raiding Comanches, German opponents of slavery, and a border with Mexico. It also has important implications for our understanding of secession across the South. Combining social and political history, Walter L. Buenger explores issues such as public hysteria, the pressure for consensus, and the vanishing of a political process in which rational debate about secession could take place. Drawing on manuscript collections and contemporary newspapers, Buenger also analyzes election returns, population shifts, and the breakdown of populations within Texas counties. Buenger demonstrates that Texans were not simply ardent secessionists or committed unionists. At the end of 1860, the majority fell between these two extremes, creating an atmosphere of ambivalence toward secession which was not erased even by the war.

Download or read book Blood Oranges written by Timothy P. Bowman and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blood Oranges traces the origins and legacy of racial differences between Anglo Americans and ethnic Mexicans (Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans) in the South Texas borderlands in the twentieth century. Author Tim Bowman uncovers a complex web of historical circumstances that caused ethnic Mexicans in the region to rank among the poorest, least educated, and unhealthiest demographic in the country. The key to this development, Bowman finds, was a “modern colonization movement,” a process that had its roots in the Mexican-American war of the nineteenth century but reached its culmination in the twentieth century. South Texas, in Bowman’s words, became an “internal economy just inside of the US-Mexico border.” Beginning in the twentieth century, Anglo Americans consciously transformed the region from that of a culturally “Mexican” space, with an economy based on cattle, into one dominated by commercial agriculture focused on citrus and winter vegetables. As Anglos gained political and economic control in the region, they also consolidated their power along racial lines with laws and customs not unlike the “Jim Crow” system of southern segregation. Bowman argues that the Mexican labor class was thus transformed into a marginalized racial caste, the legacy of which remained in place even as large-scale agribusiness cemented its hold on the regional economy later in the century. Blood Oranges stands to be a major contribution to the history of South Texas and borderland studies alike.

Download or read book Jos Mar a de Jes s Carvajal written by Joseph E. Chance and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: José María de Jesús Carvajalis both a biography of a Mexican postrevolutionary and a study of the development of a new border between Mexico and the United States during the crucial decades of the early to mid–nineteenth century. The work examines the challenges faced by Carvajal, a bilingual, bicultural character in confusing times, against the historical backdrop of the history of colonial Texas and northern Mexico. Chance has chosen to focus on a political-military figure whose career stretches from the Texas Revolution to the French Intervention. Carvajal played a key role in the violent struggle between the liberal and conservative political factions that vied for control of the Republic of Mexico from 1830 to 1874. He was the leader of a mercenary army that invaded Mexico from the United States in 1851 in an unsuccessful attempt for the creation of the so-called independent Republic of the Sierra Madre. In addition, he played significant roles in the struggle for Texas Independence and formation of the ill-fated Republic of the Rio Grande; and he opposed the American occupation of northern Mexico during the Mexican-American War, the War of Reform that solidified liberal control of Mexico under the leadership of Benito Juarez, and the French Intervention into Mexico. Carvajal’s life and exploits have been largely overlooked by contemporary historians. This work sheds new light on several important chapters in the history of Texas and northern Mexico.

Download or read book Texas Divided written by James Marten and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War hardly scratched the Confederate state of Texas. Thousands of Texans died on battlefields hundreds of miles to the east, of course, but the war did not destroy Texas's farms or plantations or her few miles of railroads. Although unchallenged from without, Confederate Texans faced challenges from within—from fellow Texans who opposed their cause. Dissension sprang from a multitude of seeds. It emerged from prewar political and ethnic differences; it surfaced after wartime hardships and potential danger wore down the resistance of less-than-enthusiastic rebels; it flourished, as some reaped huge profits from the bizarre war economy of Texas. Texas Divided is neither the history of the Civil War in Texas, nor of secession or Reconstruction. Rather, it is the history of men dealing with the sometimes fragmented southern society in which they lived—some fighting to change it, others to preserve it—and an examination of the lines that divided Texas and Texans during the sectional conflict of the nineteenth century.

Download or read book Master Builder of the Lower Rio Grande written by W. Eugene George and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1865, Heinrich Portscheller emigrated to Mexico from his native Germany, perhaps motivated by a desire to avoid compulsory military service in the Austro-Prussian War. The scion of a well-known family of masons and master builders, he had the misfortune to disembark at Veracruz during the Franco-Mexican War. Portscheller and his traveling companion were impressed into the imperialist forces and sent to northern Mexico. Sometime following the Battle of Santa Gertrudis in1866, Portscheller deserted the army and eventually made a place for himself in Roma, a small town in Starr County, Texas. Over the next decades, Portscheller acquired a reputation as a master builder and architect. He brought to the Lower Rio Grande Valley his long heritage of Old World building knowledge and skills and integrated them with the practices of local Mexican construction and vernacular architecture. However, despite his many contributions to the distinctive architecture of Roma and surrounding places, by the mid-twentieth century he was largely forgotten. During nearly fifty years of historical sleuthing in South Texas and Germany, W. Eugene George reconstructed many of the details of the life and career of this important South Texas craftsman. Containing editorial contributions by Mary Carolyn Hollers George and featuring a foreword by Mariá Eugenia Guerra and a concluding assessment by noted architectural historian Stephen Fox, Master Builder of the Lower Rio Grande: Heinrich Portscheller at last permits a long-overdue appreciation of the legacy of this influential architect and builder of the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

Download or read book Forging the Tortilla Curtain written by Thomas Torrans and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Forging the Tortilla Curtain reveals how the region got to be that way."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Squall Across the Atlantic written by Stuart L. Bernath and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

Download or read book Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas 1836 1986 written by David Montejano and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A benchmark publication . . . A meticulously documented work that provides an alternative interpretation and revisionist view of Mexican-Anglo relations.” –IMR (International Migration Review) Winner, Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians American Historical Association, Pacific Branch Book Award Texas Institute of Letters Friends of The Dallas Public Library Award Texas Historical Commission T. R. Fehrenbach Award, Best Ethnic, Minority, and Women’s History Publication Here is a different kind of history, an interpretive history that outlines the connections between the past and the present while maintaining a focus on Mexican-Anglo relations. This book reconstructs a history of Mexican-Anglo relations in Texas “since the Alamo,” while asking this history some sociology questions about ethnicity, social change, and society itself. In one sense, it can be described as a southwestern history about nation building, economic development, and ethnic relations. In a more comparative manner, the history points to the familiar experience of conflict and accommodation between distinct societies and peoples throughout the world. Organized to describe the sequence of class orders and the corresponding change in Mexican-Anglo relations, it is divided into four periods, which are referred to as incorporation, reconstruction, segregation, and integration. “The success of this award-winning book is in its honesty, scholarly objectivity, and daring, in the sense that it debunks the old Texas nationalism that sought to create anti-Mexican attitudes both in Texas and the Greater Southwest.” —Colonial Latin American Historical Review “An outstanding contribution to U.S. Southwest studies, Chicano history, and race relations . . . A seminal book.” –Hispanic American Historical Review

Download or read book Kings of Texas written by Don Graham and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2010-12-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for KINGS OF TEXAS "Kings of Texas is a fresh and very welcome history of the great King Ranch. It's concise but thorough, crisply written, meticulous, and very readable. It should find a wide audience." -Larry McMurtry, author of Sin Killer and the Pulitzer Prize--winning Lonesome Dove "This book is about the King Ranch, but it is about much more than that. A compelling chronicle of war, peace, love, betrayal, birth, and death in the region where the Texas-Mexico border blurs in the haze of the Wild Horse Desert, it is also an intriguing detective story with links to the present-and a first-rate read." -H.W. Brands, author of The Age of Gold and the bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist The First American

Download or read book War of a Thousand Deserts written by Brian DeLay and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1830s, after decades of relative peace, northern Mexicans and the Indians whom they called "the barbarians" descended into a terrifying cycle of violence. For the next fifteen years, owing in part to changes unleashed by American expansion, Indian warriors launched devastating attacks across ten Mexican states. Raids and counter-raids claimed thousands of lives, ruined much of northern Mexico's economy, depopulated its countryside, and left man-made "deserts" in place of thriving settlements. Just as important, this vast interethnic war informed and emboldened U.S. arguments in favor of seizing Mexican territory while leaving northern Mexicans too divided, exhausted, and distracted to resist the American invasion and subsequent occupation. Exploring Mexican, American, and Indian sources ranging from diplomatic correspondence and congressional debates to captivity narratives and plains Indians' pictorial calendars, "War of a Thousand Deserts" recovers the surprising and previously unrecognized ways in which economic, cultural, and political developments within native communities affected nineteenth-century nation-states. In the process this ambitious book offers a rich and often harrowing new narrative of the era when the United States seized half of Mexico's national territory.

Download or read book Over the Santa Fe Trail to Mexico written by Rowland Willard and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the first Anglo-Americans to record their travels to New Mexico, Dr. Rowland Willard (1794–1884) journeyed west on the Santa Fe Trail in 1825 and then down the Camino Real into Mexico, taking notes along the way. This edition of the young physician’s travel diaries and subsequent autobiography, annotated by New Mexico Deputy State Librarian Joy L. Poole, is a rich historical source on the two trails and the practice of medicine in the 1820s. Few Americans knew much about New Mexico when Willard set out on his journey from St. Charles, Missouri, where he had recently completed a medical apprenticeship. The growing commerce with the Southwest presented opportunities for the ambitious doctor. On his first day travelling the plains of the Santa Fe Trail, he met the mountain man Hugh Glass, who regaled Willard with stories of his wilderness experiences. Conducting a physical examination of Glass, Dr. Willard provided the only eye witness medical account of Glass’s deformities resulting from a grizzly bear attack. Willard referred to the mountain man as Father Glass, a testimony to his age. He visited Santa Fe, practiced medicine in Taos, then traveled south to Chihuahua, arriving during a measles epidemic. Willard treated patients in Mexico for two years before returning to Missouri in 1828. Willard’s narrative challenges long-accepted assumptions about the exact routes taken by pack trains on the Santa Fe Trail. It also provides thrilling glimpses of a landscape densely populated with wildlife. The doctor describes “a great theater of nature,” with droves of elk and buffalo, and “wolf and antelope skipping in every direction.” With his traveling companions he hunted buffalo by crawling after them on all fours, afterward making jerky out of bison meat and boats out of their hides. Willard also details his medical practice, offering a revealing view of physicians’ operating practices in a time when sanitation and anesthesia were rare. The Santa Fe Trail and Camino Real took Willard on the journey of a lifetime. This account recalls the early days of the Santa Fe Trail trade and westward American migration, when a doctor from Missouri could cross paths with mountain men, traders, Mexican clergymen, and government officials on their way to new opportunities.