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How Texas Formed America
Some say admitting Texas to the United States led to the American Civil War. If so, it was a price worth paying. Texas has had a major, and largely positive, influence on the United States and all of North America throughout its existence.
Texas, An American History, by Benjamin Heber Johnson, is a new, short one-volume history of Texas. It presents a fresh view of the Lone Star State.
Johnson mixes traditional views of Texas with a twenty-first-century approach to its history. He starts each chapter with a black-and-white illustration reminiscent of images gracing chapter headings in early twentieth-century school histories of Texas. Each chapter contains a modern perspective on the state’s history, however.
He begins with a chapter on the ancient inhabitants of what became Texas. He ends with a chapter on twenty-first-century Texas, covering events as recent as the Uvalde Massacre. In between he touches on all aspects of Texas history. He treats each group influencing Texas with the attention they deserve.
He fully explores the history of Texas under Spain, Mexico and the Indians that occupied it alongside chapters on more traditional subjects; the Texian settlement of Texas, the Lone Star Republic, and Texas as part of the US and Confederacy during the nineteenth century. He shows how Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American empires contended for Texas between the 1780s and 1850s.
He also presents the twentieth-century influence of oil, transportation, and technology on Texas. More, he shows how Texas changed the rest of the United States during that period. He demonstrates this goes beyond three Texas presidents. Texas was a cultural, technological, and political driver of the United States throughout the century and beyond. The space age, cultural trends like the television show Dallas and the urban cowboy craze were linked with Texas. So too were major sociological issues. Roe vs Wade and Obergefel both came from Texas.
While many histories of Texas focus on the nineteenth century and primarily on events within Texas this book shows how Texas influenced the rest of the United States and the North American continent throughout history. Johnson teaches Texas history at the college level. He is an academic, with the baggage that entails. Yet his love of his home state of Texas shows throughout the book, and he presents both sides fairly. Readers may disagree with some conclusions, yet this book is well worth reading.
“Texas, An American History,” by Benjamin Heber Johnson, Yale University Press, February 2025, 392 pages, $35.00 (Hardcover), $33.25 (E-book), $17.49 (Audiobook), $49.95 (Audio CD)
This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.
Published in Book Reviews
I might read this. I grew up living near Texas in eastern New Mexico, about a 10 minute drive from the state line. And if we wanted to go shopping in the “big city”, we were more likely to travel to Amarillo or Lubbock, not Albuquerque.
It seems to me that California has had an outsized influence on the United States, so I’d be interested in a counter-argument, if it indeed is one; both can be true at once.
I’d say both are true. It is generally accepted that California has an outsized influence on the US. More than just Hollywood, too. They too were an important technology center – petrochemical, aerospace and IT software and hardware. Plus a lot of social trends.
What this book does is point out Texas has equal influence. Culture? Hollywood is making movies and TV shows about Texas. Not just Urban Cowboy and Dallas, but Westerns and movies like Giant. Texas is America’s second pole in both aerospace and IT. And as far as political earthquakes go, it is hard to think of bigger ones than Roe vs Wade or Obergefel.
Hmm! Three presidents from Texas? There’s Eisenhower and LBJ. Who’s the 3rd? W grew up in Texas, but was born in CT. If he is being counted, then IKE comes off the list as he grew up in KS, when he was eight.
Going by memory, when Eisenhower ran, he declared his residency to be Texas. Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates are expected to do so, since they can’t be from the same state, per the Constitution. But his time in the Army meant he hadn’t really resided in a particular state as an adult. So he had some flexibility.
Since Bush and Johnson actually held elective office from Texas at the time they ran, it would have been awkward to pick another state.
Well, according to my memory, IKE had declared KS as his primary residence. I followed the campaign very closely, wore my “I Like Ike” button and even cut classes with a buddy of mine to see Ike when his whistlestop campaign stopped at the local train station, in Richmond CA. There was a big crowd there and we couldn’t get near the train, so we climbed up on a box car and were less than 30 feet away from where Ike was standing on the rear platform of the train. We had the best seats in the house.
Since memory can be extremely fickle, I present this ref. that might be helpful.
From a search on perplexity.ai The question was –
when eisenhower ran for president what state did he declare hs residency
“When Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952, he declared his residency as Kansas3. Although Eisenhower was born in Texas, he was raised in Abilene, Kansas, which he considered his hometown. Eisenhower’s connection to Kansas was strong, and he used it as his home state during his presidential campaign.”
On the one hand a president is supposed to represent all of America. On the other hand, multiple houses and convenient changes of residency smack of stadia-hopping pro sports teams.