Project MUSE®: Southwestern Historical Quarterly - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Southwestern Historical Quarterly.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 110 (2006-2007) through current issue Latest Articles: Southwestern Historical QuarterlyTWOProject MUSE®Southwestern Historical Quarterly1558-95600038-478XLatest articles in Southwestern Historical Quarterly. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Twilight of the Old Army in Texas 1900–1941 by Thomas "Ty" Smith (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982707
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This volume is the third book in the trilogy by Colonel Thomas "Ty" Smith (Ret.) on the operations and organizational evolution of the old US Army in Texas prior to World War II. Twilight of the Old Army in Texas explores a broad range of topics and reforms that transformed the Army from its horse and rawhide days to embrace mechanized technology both on the ground and in the air. The well-told story of the transformational period chronicles the history of the process within the ranks that challenged old norms and time-honored traditions of the Army.At the dawn of the new century, three-fourths of the Army—numbering about 71,000 men—found itself spread across the Pacific region and on isolated duty in Cuba and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallTwilight of the Old Army in Texas 1900–1941 by Thomas "Ty" Smith (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USTwilight of the Old Army in Texas 1900–1941 by Thomas "Ty" Smith (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®75412026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Whose Water Is It, Anyway? The Formation and Activities of High Plains Underground Water Conservation District No. 1
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982692
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A farmer watches his irrigation well pumping on the Southern High Plains, circa 1950s. Photograph courtesy of Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, Winston Reeves Photograph Collection, wr.c.53P.3.4.1.1After the designation of Yellowstone as a national park in 1872, the conservation of natural resources slowly moved to the forefront of American consciousness. The High Plains of Texas was not an exception. As cities grew and agriculture became increasingly important, concerns about water supplies increased. The accelerated depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer after World War II and mounting worries about groundwater regulation by federal or state authorities led High
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallWhose Water Is It, Anyway? The Formation and Activities of High Plains Underground Water Conservation District No. 12026-02-14text/htmlen-USWhose Water Is It, Anyway? The Formation and Activities of High Plains Underground Water Conservation District No. 12026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®1565502026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14The Water Cries: Uncovering the Slave Auction Houses of Galveston, Texas by Anthony Paul Griffin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982708
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Anthony Griffin's The Water Cries: Uncovering the Slave Auction Houses of Galveston, Texas, is a remarkable and unsettling work. More than a historical narrative, it is part memoir, part collective memory of Black Galvestonians, and ultimately a call to confront the island's difficult racial legacy.Griffin, who trained as an attorney, became known locally for representing unpopular clients and causes in cases where he believed larger moral questions were at stake. His persistence, despite criticism (and occasional threats), reflects the same conviction that shapes The Water Cries, that stands as an indictment of Galveston's deeply embedded ties to slavery and its enduring consequences down to the present
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallThe Water Cries: Uncovering the Slave Auction Houses of Galveston, Texas by Anthony Paul Griffin (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USThe Water Cries: Uncovering the Slave Auction Houses of Galveston, Texas by Anthony Paul Griffin (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®53552026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Texas Turf: Horse Racing in 19th Century Texas by Anne J. Bailey (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982705
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In Texas Turf: Horse Racing in 19th Century Texas, Anne J. Bailey provides a detailed study of the development of horse racing in Texas, dedicating each chapter to a specific decade of the nineteenth century and often connecting it to the broader American sport and its influence beyond the Texas landscape. Bailey states that "the nineteenth century was truly a golden age of racing when it was the main entertainment for those seeking a break from their daily routine." (xiii) Bailey explains that as more people migrated into Texas, they brought their customs, shaping the frontier environment with southern traditions. Their leisure activities reflected southern values and flaws—including hunting, fishing, dancing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallTexas Turf: Horse Racing in 19th Century Texas by Anne J. Bailey (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USTexas Turf: Horse Racing in 19th Century Texas by Anne J. Bailey (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®54682026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms by Mike Hixenbaugh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982706
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Nearly two centuries ago, public schools in the United States originated as Horace Mann's dream that educated Americans might become good citizens and morally adjusted agents of progressive change. NBC News journalist Mike Hixenbaugh's They Came for the Schools argues that leading populist Republican politicians and their puritanical evangelical allies have subverted this dream into a nightmare of oppression where marginalized American families and their children have become victimized in the name of a very different vision of a moral society.The narrative begins in Southlake, an affluent and predominantly Anglo suburb of Dallas whose communities became bitterly divided during the presidencies of Barack Obama and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallThey Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms by Mike Hixenbaugh (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USThey Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms by Mike Hixenbaugh (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®53162026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Loose of Earth: A Memoir by Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982700
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Loose of Earth is Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn's well-written coming-of-age story on how her family was upended by toxic exposure of which they were unaware. In writing the book, Blackburn advances an unfolding narrative about the nature of the contaminants, the types of people exposed, and the varied victim responses to the illness.Beginning in the 1990s, several authors wrote books that focused on civilian populations affected by radioactive toxins in the United States. Starting with the Manhattan Project, the authors described atmospheric testing of atomic bombs in Nevada, uranium refining in Missouri, nuclear weapons production in Colorado, and the suffering of Washington State residents who lived downwind from a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallLoose of Earth: A Memoir by Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USLoose of Earth: A Memoir by Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®64752026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14The Oil Fraternity in Texas: Moral Economy and Petroleum Engineering Science by Edward W. Constant II (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982701
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Edward W. Constant II delivers a thoughtful and deeply researched synthesis of technological history, legal evolution, and sociocultural analysis. The book offers a compelling account of how petroleum engineering science emerged, matured, and ultimately reshaped the legal and moral landscape of oil production in Texas in the twentieth century. This is not merely a history of a profession or an industry. It is the sociotechnical ethnography of a community whose values, institutions, and epistemologies co-evolved with the subsurface resources they sought to control.At the core of Constant's narrative is the concept of moral economy, drawn from E.P. Thompson and James C. Scott, and reinterpreted to describe the ethos
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallThe Oil Fraternity in Texas: Moral Economy and Petroleum Engineering Science by Edward W. Constant II (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USThe Oil Fraternity in Texas: Moral Economy and Petroleum Engineering Science by Edward W. Constant II (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®63752026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982702
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The authors of this rich, thoroughly researched, and well-written book present the first extensive history of the eugenics movement in Texas. Now discredited among natural and social scientists, eugenics embodied "a belief in immutable differences between human races" in terms of "intelligence, physical strength, endurance, and character." (191) An example of recent historical scholarship that examines controversial and uncomfortable topics, the book's title is a quote from nineteenth-century Texas physician Gideon Linceum, a biological racist and practitioner of the surgical castration or "sterilization" of perceived mentally defective individuals with a "knife of purification." (7) The Purifying Knife considers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallThe Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USThe Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®62512026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Saltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas by Jim Burnett (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982703
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Jim Burnett's new book, Saltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas, chronicles the migration and settlement experience of John and Johanette Stengler—they were quick to Anglicize their names—and their seven children, who journey from Dietz, Germany, to Galveston, Texas, just as Texas joins the Union in December 1845. They had come over originally as members of the Adelsverein (or the Society for the Protection of German Emigrants in Texas), an organization of German noblemen who had bought into the Fisher-Miller Land Grant and who eventually settled thousands of German immigrants in and around New Braunfels and Fredericksburg. However, once the family arrived in Galveston, the talk was all about
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallSaltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas by Jim Burnett (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USSaltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas by Jim Burnett (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®49732026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14David Crockett in Texas: His Search for New Land by Allen J. Weiner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982698
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There are very few figures from the pantheon of participants in the Texas Revolution who have received more attention than a failed US congressman and land speculator from Tennessee, David Crockett. Crockett epitomized the Jacksonian era drive to achieve success and social status through the acquisition of vast quantities of land. It was this lust for land that would propel Crockett to a violent death at the Alamo, and the immortality that came as a result. Even though Crockett had achieved national renown prior to his arrival in Texas, his death at the Texas "Shrine of Liberty" provided him with a special place in the hearts of many Texans.In David Crockett in Texas: His Search for New Land, Allen Weiner uniquely
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallDavid Crockett in Texas: His Search for New Land by Allen J. Weiner (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USDavid Crockett in Texas: His Search for New Land by Allen J. Weiner (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®46162026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana by David T. Ballantyne (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982699
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David T. Ballantyne's Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana emerges as an excellent contribution to Reconstruction historiography. In this book, Ballantyne provides a comprehensive view of a fascinating community in the Deep South during Reconstruction: Rapides Parish, Louisiana. Central Louisiana serves as an excellent case study as the parish mirrored the demographics of the state as a whole, contained one of region's major cities in Alexandria, and witnessed multiple outbreaks of the racial violence that directly contributed to Reconstruction's undoing. By retaining this focus, Fractured Freedoms allows for insights into how Reconstruction unfolded on the ground and, in doing so, transforms the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallFractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana by David T. Ballantyne (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USFractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana by David T. Ballantyne (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®55452026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Southwestern Collection
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982694
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A farmer manually opens a cut in his elevated ditch to flood irrigate a field near Lubbock, Texas, in 1949. Courtesy of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University, Lubbock History Photograph CollectionWe at the TSHA proudly announce that our Director of Publications, Richard B. "Rick" McCaslin, Ph.D., has been appointed Texas State Historian by Governor Greg Abbott. Dr. McCaslin's term will expire on December 17, 2027.Dr. McCaslin brings more than four decades of scholarly and teaching experience to the role. He currently serves as our Director of Publications and retired in 2023 as Professor of Texas History at the University of North Texas. A Fellow of TSHA, he is the author or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallSouthwestern Collection2026-02-14text/htmlen-USSouthwestern Collection2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®1739622026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Alcon Laboratories: A Vision Fulfilled, 1947–1997 by Thomas O. McDonald (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982695
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More than eighty years ago, Texas industry took the lead from agriculture in the state's economy during World War II. At that time, Eugene C. Barker, director emeritus of the Texas State Historical Association, declared that there needed to be more histories of business in the Lone Star State. Since then, some scholars have heeded that call to action, but Texas historiography remains sorely lacking in scholarly works concerning economic enterprise. This persists despite the reality that Texans have prospered in everything from oil and gas to computers and medicine. But Thomas O. McDonald, with this book, provides a corrective in telling the rags-to-riches story of Alcon Laboratories, a Texas company whose products
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallAlcon Laboratories: A Vision Fulfilled, 1947–1997 by Thomas O. McDonald (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USAlcon Laboratories: A Vision Fulfilled, 1947–1997 by Thomas O. McDonald (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®50632026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Black Soldiers, White Laws: The Tragedy of the 24th Infantry in 1917 Houston by John A. Haymond (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982696
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This book confirms the idea that every fifty years significant events deserve to be reexamined. Robert V. Haynes wrote a commendable study, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Louisiana State University Press, 1976). Four decades later John Haymond accessed research materials unavailable to Haynes, leading to Haymond's more detailed and comprehensive analysis of the civil unrest and its aftermath.Haymond emphasizes the significant circumstances of the summer of 1917. The long era of Jim Crow segregation gripped the nation. The US Congress had declared war on Germany, putting America on the Allied side in World War I. With the nation on a war footing, President Woodrow Wilson required the US Army to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallBlack Soldiers, White Laws: The Tragedy of the 24th Infantry in 1917 Houston by John A. Haymond (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USBlack Soldiers, White Laws: The Tragedy of the 24th Infantry in 1917 Houston by John A. Haymond (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®52052026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War-Era Gulf South by Maria Angela Diaz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982697
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With much recent attention on American hegemony over the Gulf of Mexico and the proper name for that familiar body of water, Maria Angela Diaz's A Continuous State of War offers a refocusing on the Gulf South in the immediate decades leading to the Civil War and its aftermath. Doing so, she insists, helps us better understand the Southern/American imperial project in both its political and racial dimensions. Diaz argues that "Gulf Coast communities facilitated both the physical efforts to seize territory and the construction of the highly racialized imperialist ideas that imagined Latin America as a region that could secure the South's future." (2) When the Southern project came to oblivion in the fiery destruction
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallA Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War-Era Gulf South by Maria Angela Diaz (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USA Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War-Era Gulf South by Maria Angela Diaz (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®56602026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Harry M. Wurzbach: The Last Protagonist of Black and Tan Republicanism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982691
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H. M. Wurzbach of Texas; glass negative, circa 1918–1922. Courtesy the Library of Congress, gift of Herbert A. French, 1947Although Texas is often viewed as part of the one-party South, that is not entirely true, thanks not only to Black voters but also in part to Texas Germans. During the entire decade of the 1920s and down to his death in 1931, Seguin lawyer Harry M. Wurzbach served in Congress as the sole Republican from Texas or anywhere else in the Deep South. Wurzbach's finest hour came as a freshman Congressman who had defeated an incumbent and flipped his district. He voted in support of an anti-lynching bill that passed the House in January 1922, only to be filibustered to death in the Senate. Wurzbach was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallHarry M. Wurzbach: The Last Protagonist of Black and Tan Republicanism2026-02-14text/htmlen-USHarry M. Wurzbach: The Last Protagonist of Black and Tan Republicanism2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®822782026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Slavery at La Junta de los Ríos: History Gone Astray
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982693
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1994 painting by artist Feather Radha depicting a pitched battle between Spanish horsemen and the native peoples of La Junta. Courtesy Elsa Socorro Arroyo/Texas Beyond HistoryIn Spanish colonial times, there was a river valley in deep West Texas called La Junta de los Rios—the joining of the rivers. It is there, where Presidio and Ojinaga face each other at the western edge of the Big Bend, that the Rio Conchos of Mexico joins the Rio Grande. Very early in the Spanish colonial period, between 1570 and 1582, there were some initial slaving raids at La Junta, but their scope has been misinterpreted. Scholars have prolonged the alleged duration of those raids far beyond that early decade without providing any
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallSlavery at La Junta de los Ríos: History Gone Astray2026-02-14text/htmlen-USSlavery at La Junta de los Ríos: History Gone Astray2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®492462026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14Surveying the Capitol Land Reservation in Texas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982690
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Map of the Capitol Land Reservation; Dallam, Hartley, and Oldham Counties. Courtesy of the Twitchell Survey Records Collection, Texas General Land OfficeDuring the closing years of the 1870s, vast areas of public lands owned by the State of Texas remained underutilized and their value unrealized as the state exited the Reconstruction period. With the adoption of the Constitution of 1876, this asset became the focus of state efforts to develop public works. This Constitution provided for the appropriation of 3 million acres of the public domain to fund the construction of a new state Capitol, a story that many Texans know well. A lesser-known aspect of this history entails the controversies that complicated the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallSurveying the Capitol Land Reservation in Texas2026-02-14text/htmlen-USSurveying the Capitol Land Reservation in Texas2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®1182762026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys by Lise Olsen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982704
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Imagine this nightmarish scenario: Your daughter, set to graduate near the top of her high school class and for whom you hope a financially rewarding professional career, announces that her educational goal is to pursue graduate studies in anthropology. You can either despair at this news or take heart from this important and engaging study by investigative journalist, Lise Olsen. Her subject is the serial murderer, Dean Corll, whose killings of several dozen boys shocked Houston and the world when the story broke in 1973. The book's heroine is Sharron Derrick, who went to work for the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office in 2006 after earning a doctorate in bioarcheology from Texas A&M and becoming a forensic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/340/image/coversmallThe Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys by Lise Olsen (review)2026-02-14text/htmlen-USThe Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys by Lise Olsen (review)2026-02-142026TWOProject MUSE®67142026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-14