by Candice Lyons In 2001, many of Lizzie Scott Neblett’s diaries and letters were published in a volume entitled A Rebel Wife In Texas. The text provides a harrowing glimpse into the desperation, brutality, and minutiae of everyday life in antebellum Texas from the perspective of a landed, slaveholding, Southern wife. Letters written to […]
Texas
Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer’s Hotel and Urban Slavery
by Clifton Sorrell III On the eve of the Civil War, an advertisement appeared in the Texas Almanac announcing the sale of five enslaved people at the Stringer’s Hotel. “Negroes For Sale––I will offer for sale, in the city of Austin, before the Stringer’s Hotel, on the 1st day of January next, to the highest […]
Documenting Slavery in East Texas: Transcripts from Monte Verdi
By Daniel J. Thomas III Originally from Macon, Alabama, Julien Sidney Devereux, Sr (1805-1856) moved to east Texas where he eventually purchased land in Rusk County. This plat would eventually become Monte Verdi, one of the highest producing cotton plantations in the state, where over fifty Africans were enslaved. The Devereux family papers and the […]
Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation
by Candice D. Lyons In the spring of 1852, Benjamin Roper, overseer to Galveston area plantations Evergreen and Headquarters, wrote a short letter to his employer to inform him that “on the night of [April] 30 I cut Lewis [an enslaved man] with a knife…He is now and has been since his misfortune at Dr. […]
The Enslaved and the Blind: State Officials and Enslaved People in Austin, Texas
By Daniel Josiah Thomas III On November 6, 1855, Washington Hill commissioned Abner H. Cook to build a southern plantation house in Austin, Texas. The Texas Historical Commission reported that “the property worth $900 in August 1855 was worth $8,000 when Hill paid his taxes for 1856.” When the two-story limestone home was completed, Hill […]
Voting Rights Still Threatened 100 Years After the 19th Amendment
by Laurie Green 100 years ago, Congress approved the 19th Amendment, which prohibited the denial or limitation of voting rights “on account of sex.” The agonizing, fourteen-month struggle by suffragists to get three-quarters of the states to ratify the Amendment, especially its dramatic culmination in the Tennessee statehouse, has garnered much attention. But it may […]
Dean Page Keeton and Academic Freedom at UT Austin: Three Archival Letters
by Josiah M. Daniel, III One bonus of archival research is to discover documents irrelevant to the topic but so evocative that they can’t be ignored. In the State Bar of Texas archives, I found three letters from June 1960 between W. Page Keeton (1909-1999), Dean of the School of Law of The University of […]
Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas
By Micaela Valadez The year 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the Tex-Son strike, a major labor battle waged in San Antonio, Texas from 1959 to 1963 by mostly Mexican, Mexican-American, and some Anglo women all of whom were active members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Local 180. This strike is important […]
Love in the Time of Texas Slavery
By María Esther Hammack An earlier version of this story was published on Forth Part of the World. I wasn’t looking to find a story of abounding love when researching violent episodes of Texas history. Then I ran across a Texas newspaper article that shed a brief light on the lives of a Black woman […]
The Blackwell School in Marfa, Texas
By Samuel Ginsburg Marfa, a West Texas town of less than 2,000 permanent residents, attracts a lot of visitors. Known as the backdrop to 1959 James Dean film Giant, the town’s main attractions include two main streets lined with galleries, the mysterious Marfa lights that only seem to come out when nobody is looking, and […]
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