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 Reddest of the Blacks”
By Sean Guillory Lovett Fort-Whiteman was born in Dallas, Texas in 1889 and died in a Stalinist labor camp sometime after 1938. The son of a former slave, a graduate of Tuskegee University, Fort-Whiteman became one of the most important African American Communist activists and organizers of the 1920s and the only known African American to be […]
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 […]
A Longhorn’s Life of Service: Tom Ward
By Nicholas Roland On March 23, 1961, recently-inaugurated President John F. Kennedy held a press conference at the State Department on Laos, a country little-known to most Americans at the time. Using a series of oversized maps, Kennedy detailed the advance of Communist Laotian and North Vietnamese forces in the country’s northeastern provinces. Rejecting an […]
From There to Here: Indrani Chatterjee
By Indrani Chatterjee In 1947, when British India was carved into two states of India and Pakistan, many Hindu families relocated from eastern Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971) to Indian Bengal. My parents came from two such families. My father was deeply curious about the world, and bought various Readers Digest and National Geographic publications on a meager […]
Fandangos, Intemperance, and Debauchery
By Ben Wright “Can any good come out of San Antonio?” This was the question at the heart of an 1846 letter penned by the Rev. John McCullough. He was writing to his Presbyterian superiors on the East Coast, who had assigned him the task of conducting missionary work on the new American frontier in […]
Dazed and Confused (Dir: Linklater, 1993)
by Ashley Garcia Borrowing its title from Led Zeppelin’s first album, Richard Linklater’s classic film Dazed and Confused continues to resonate with filmgoers and critics decades after its release. This September marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Linklater’s cult hit and the overwhelming surge of Dazed and Confused viewing parties along with its re-release in theaters […]
The Public Archive: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions
Kolaches (Credit: Whitney, via Flickr) Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and […]
Paying for Peace: Reflections on the “Lasting Peace” Monument
by Jesse Ritner Fredericksburg is a small town in central Texas. Known for its wineries, beer halls, and its World War II museum, it is now often overshadowed by the urban hubs of San Antonio and Austin, both within a two-hour drive of town. Yet, in 1847 Fredericksburg was a point of serious contention for […]
The Tiger
By Nathan Stone My mother’s father was a Presbyterian gentleman, one of the early Houstonians bent on making blue-collar Houston into a more respectable place. That was back in the 1920s. He had come down from Kentucky with his actress wife, my Irish Catholic grandmother, to start an advertising business in one of the classic […]
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