Texas Originals: Recent Episodes
Humanities Texas
Developed by Humanities Texas in partnership with Houston Public Media, Texas Originals features profiles of individuals whose life and achievements have had a profound influence upon Texas history and culture. The program is also broadcast on public and commercial radio stations throughout Texas.
Born in 1916, Henry B. González was the first Mexican American to represent Texas in Congress. An expert on the nation's banking system, he oversaw the 1989 savings and loan bailout, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He also led efforts to overhaul public housing and increase transparency at the Federal Reserve. González was reelected eighteen times and became the longest-serving Hispanic member of Congress.
Born in 1888, Walter Prescott Webb remains one of Texas's most significant and influential scholars. Webb taught at The University of Texas throughout his career. He served as director of the Texas State Historical Association and spearheaded the creation of The Handbook of Texas, the definitive encyclopedia of the state's history. In 1950, a survey of historians identified his 1931 study The Great Plains as the single most important work in U.S. history written since the turn of the century.
Civil rights leader James Farmer was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1920. Though he originally planned to become a Methodist minister, the influence of legendary teacher Melvin Tolson—and segregation within the church—led Farmer to activism. In 1942, Farmer organized the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Chicago. A decade before the civil rights movement made headlines, CORE followed Gandhian principles of nonviolent direct action to fight racial discrimination, pioneering the tactics that eventually dismantled segregation in the South.
Henry Allen Bullock devoted his life to advancing African American education in Texas—and made history in the process. His history of African American education in the South earned him the Bancroft Prize. He testified for the inclusion of African American history in Texas history textbooks and served on the Texas advisory committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In 1969, he became the first African American appointed to the faculty of arts and sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.
The scholar and writer Américo Paredes was born in Brownsville in 1915. Even as a youth, he saw that a distinct culture had emerged in the Rio Grande Valley—not just Mexican or American, but a blend of the two. Paredes made the border the focus of his career. He studied and celebrated the distinctive stories and humor of the lower Rio Grande, at the same time fighting to correct prejudice against Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
Tomás Rivera's career as a writer and educator was shaped by the struggles of his family, who spent much of their lives as farm laborers following the annual harvests from Texas to the Midwest. Rivera's landmark 1971 novel …y no se lo tragó la tierra—or, in English translation, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him—portrays the terrible conditions faced by Mexican American farm workers. Later in life, as a university administrator, Rivera committed himself to supporting first-generation college students such as himself.
Folklorist and oral history pioneer Mody Boatright was no stranger to the tall tale. Raised in a West Texas ranching family in the early twentieth century, he was descended from pioneers, cattlemen, and merchants. He grew up immersed in stories of the Texas frontier.
Born in 1844, Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis was one of the most important Texas writers of the nineteenth century. Her novel The Wire-Cutters is set during the Texas fence-cutting wars of the 1880s, when ranchers began restricting access to large sections of the previously open range. The Wire-Cutters is now recognized as one of the first "westerns" in American literary history.
Once described as the "Gertrude Stein of San Antonio," Marion Koogler McNay created the first museum of modern art in Texas. Over the course of her life, she collected European and American art, and especially loved the art of the American Southwest. McNay bequeathed her expansive residence, acreage, and more than 700 works of art to San Antonio in 1950. Today, the McNay Art Museum is one of the state's cultural treasures, boasting a remarkable collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of art, including works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Georgia O'Keefe, and other European and American masters.
Born to a sharecropping family in northeast Texas in 1892, Bessie Coleman became the world’s first female African American aviator. Her daredevil feats in air shows captivated crowds and earned her the nickname "Brave Bessie." An advocate for equal rights, Coleman encouraged young African Americans to fly, and she refused to participate in air shows that disallowed black attendance. In 1929, a flying school for African Americans was founded in her honor in Los Angeles, ensuring her legacy as a pioneer in aviation and civil rights.
Poet and educator Melvin B. Tolson began teaching at the historically black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, in 1924. A dedicated mentor, he coached Wiley's debate team through an impressive ten-year winning streak. The team is portrayed in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, with Tolson portrayed by Denzel Washington. Tolson was also a brilliant and inventive poet, drawing upon both the western tradition and the distinctive rhythm and vernacular of the blues. In 1947, the African nation of Liberia named him poet laureate.
In 1932, when John Nance Garner became the nation's thirty-second vice president, Texans were just beginning to exert influence and leadership at the national level. Garner, however, was hardly a newcomer. The Uvalde native had served fifteen consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was Speaker of the House when Franklin D. Roosevelt chose him as his running mate.
Among the most important Anglo settlements in Spanish Texas was DeWitt's Colony, founded in 1825 by Green DeWitt and James Kerr along the Guadalupe River. DeWitt and his wife Sarah moved their family to the colony in 1826. Several years later, Sarah became responsible for one of the enduring symbols of the Texas Revolution.
Mary Maverick's diaries paint a vivid picture of life on the Texas frontier. Living in San Antonio, she witnessed the bloody Council House Fight of 1840, a turning point in relations between Texians and the Comanche. She wrote about notable figures of Texas history, including Jack Hays, Juan Seguín, and Mirabeau Lamar. Mary also faced the challenges of raising a family alone while her husband was away. Three years before her death in 1898, she compiled and edited her memoirs with the aid of her son, leaving us with a remarkable account of life in early Texas.
Cynthia Ann Parker is the most famous Indian captive in American history. Captured when she was six years old, Parker spent twenty-four years with the Comanche, eventually marrying the warrior Peta Nocona, with whom she had two sons and a daughter. In 1860, Texas Rangers and federal soldiers abducted Parker in an attack on a Comanche encampment in north Texas. Sadly, she struggled to readjust. A number of times she tried to escape and return to the Comanche and her children, including her son Quanah—who became the most important Comanche leader of his day.
Known affectionately as "Mr. Sam," Sam Rayburn helped pass some of the twentieth century's most important legislation, working, as he put it, "with, not under," eight Presidents. Elected to Congress in 1912, he spent forty-nine years in the U.S. House of Representatives, including a record seventeen years as House Speaker.
Born in 1928, the artist Donald Judd was nurtured in the cultural hotbed of New York City. But the austere, high desert of West Texas became his artistic home.
Born in Laredo in 1885, journalist and activist Jovita Idár abandoned a teaching career to write for her father's weekly newspaper, La Crónica. Idár denounced the dismal social, educational, and economic conditions of Texas Mexicans. As an educated Tejana, she felt duty-bound to promote civil rights—including women's rights—and education. "Educate a woman," Idár often said, "and you educate a family."
In 1790, the woman now known as the first "cattle queen" of Texas—Rosa María Hinojosa de Ballí—inherited fifty-five thousand acres in what is now South Texas. Doña Rosa possessed a strong will, exceptional foresight, and shrewd business skills. When she died, in 1803, she had amassed more than a million acres of ranch land in the lower Rio Grande Valley.
One of the most acclaimed American photographers of the twentieth century, Russell Lee developed his distinctive style while documenting the effects of the Great Depression on rural communities for the Farm Security Administration. Lee's iconic images of ordinary Americans in extraordinary circumstances helped inspire the form now known as documentary photography.
Eugene C. Barker, in the words of his biographer, "did more than any other historian to show the influence that Texas exerted in shaping the destiny of the United States." As a scholar, Barker furthered the study of Texas and expanded the Texas State Historical Association. In 1925, he published the first biography of Stephen F. Austin. Through this and other works, Barker made narratives of the borderlands central to American history.
Known as "Miss Amarillo," Laura V. Hamner devoted much of her life to recording and sharing the history of the Texas Panhandle. She became known for "prowling" the region, interviewing ranchers, cowboys, and pioneers—and once boldly facing gunfire to meet with a former outlaw. Hamner’s books are now regarded as invaluable sources of Texas ranching history.
Writer and promoter Jane Cazneau helped shape Texas and American history in the mid-nineteenth century. Working as a journalist in the 1840s and 50s, she campaigned tirelessly for Texas independence. Her columns in periodicals such as the New York Sun helped sway public opinion in support of Texas statehood—and America's "manifest destiny" more generally.
Acclaimed singer and actress Etta Moten Barnett was born in Weimar, Texas, in 1901. By the age of ten, she was singing in the choir of her father’s church. Thirty-three years later, at the invitation of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, she became the first African American woman to sing at the White House. Barnett starred on Broadway, most notably as Bess in a revival of Porgy and Bess. She charmed audiences around the world singing in concerts with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. She was also deeply involved in civic affairs, women’s issues, and causes such as African independence.
Empresario Martín De León founded the city of Victoria and played a key role in settling the Texas Coastal Bend. De León oversaw the only empresario grant to attract large numbers of settlers from Mexico rather than the United States. As tensions rose between Anglo American colonists and the Mexican government, De León’s life illustrates how complicated loyalty was for Tejanos during the struggle for Texas independence.
Gail Borden Jr. was undaunted by failure. In the 1840s he built a wagon meant to travel on land and water but did neither successfully. His nutritional biscuits made from dehydrated meat and flour were unpalatable. Yet Borden kept at it. In the 1850s, he developed a way to condense milk—and this time, succeeded on a grand scale.
Texas became a two-party state in 1961, when conservative Republican John Tower was elected to the U.S. Senate. He was the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction. During four senate terms, Tower was a master at moving legislation through Congress and a political mentor to many Texas Republicans, including future President George H. W. Bush.
In 1890, James Stephen Hogg became the state's first native-born governor. Six-foot-two and nearly three hundred pounds, "Big Jim," as he was known, vigorously fought for the interests of the common citizen. At the forefront of the Progressive reform movement in Texas, Hogg opposed abuses by insurance companies, railroad monopolies, and land corporations.
Born in Indiana in 1859, writer Andy Adams lived the cowboy life on the Texas plains. He later rendered those experiences in classic novels such as The Log of a Cowboy (1903) to set Americans straight about life in the West.
A self-described "student and jealous lover of Texas history," Adina De Zavala is best known for barricading herself for three days in the Alamo in 1908 to protest plans for its destruction.
Plácido Benavides is called the "Paul Revere of Texas" for his role in the Texas Revolution, as he was dispatched to Goliad to alert others of the Mexican army's approach. Although he had joined the Texians in opposing Mexican dictator Santa Anna, Benavides was fighting for Texas as part of a federalist Mexico, not for Texas independence.
Karle Wilson Baker was Texas's most celebrated poet in the first half of the twentieth century. Originally born in Arkansas, she fell under the spell of her adopted state, writing about the role of Texans in the American drama. Her collection of poems Dreamers on Horseback was nominated for the 1931 Pulitzer Prize.
After receiving a land grant from the Spanish government, Moses Austin planned to establish the first American colony in Spanish Texas. However, he died before his colonial dream became a reality. His son, Stephen F. Austin, succeeded him as leader of the Texas colony.
Texarkana's Scott Joplin is one the most popular songwriters in American history. At the turn of the twentieth century, he was known as the "King of Ragtime."
Lawyer and federal judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes is best known for administering the oath of office to Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One after John F. Kennedy's assassination. Over the course of her remarkable career, she championed equal rights and encouraged women to get involved in politics, illustrating her lifelong belief that "women can indeed be a force in history."
James Fannin led the Texas rebels massacred at Goliad in 1836. His defeat inspired the victory that secured Texas independence.
Librarian and historian Nettie Lee Benson rose from a bookish South Texas childhood to assemble one of the world’s leading archives for research on Latin America. Now, scholars from around the world visit the Austin library bearing her name.
Journalist, playwright, and raconteur Larry L. King spent most of his life in Washington, DC, but the vivid language and distinctive characters of his home state of Texas never ceased to inspire him. Texas, he once said, "provided me with the stuff of a career," and his work endures as a vibrant chronicle of the state's politics, culture, and personalities.
San Marcos native Cleto Rodríguez was born in 1923. By the age of nine, he had lost both his parents and was raised in San Antonio by relatives. Rodríguez began his military career in 1944 when he joined the Army. For his heroism in World War II, he received the nation's highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. Rodríguez was the fifth Mexican American ever to earn this honor—and one of fourteen Texans who earned it during World War II.
Cherokee leader Chief Bowl, also known as "Bowles" and "Duwali," was born in North Carolina around 1756 to a Scottish father and a Cherokee mother. In the early nineteenth century, Bowl led the first large Cherokee emigration west of the Mississippi River—to Missouri, then Arkansas, and finally to the Mexican province of Texas. There, in a settlement near Nacogdoches, Bowl headed an alliance of Cherokee villages and later perished in battle while fighting for Cherokee land rights..
In 1888, the historical novel Remember the Alamo was published to popular and critical acclaim. The novel's unlikely author was Amelia Barr, a British writer who lived in Texas in the mid-nineteenth century. To support herself after her husband and three of her children died of yellow fever in Galveston, she launched a remarkably successful writing career. In her memoir, completed at age eighty, she wrote that she hoped her life story might help "any sad or doubtful woman to outleap her own shadow, and to stand bravely out in the sunshine to meet her destiny."
Sarah Horton Cockrell played a pivotal role in Dallas's early economic development. In 1872, she raised funds to open the first iron bridge over the Trinity River, thereby connecting Dallas to major roads south and west. By the time of her death in 1892, she owned almost a fourth of the city's downtown. She is now remembered as "Dallas's first capitalist."
The singer who first performed the song "Ol' Man River" is an obscure figure today. Baritone Julius Bledsoe was among the first African Americans to appear on Broadway, but he made few recordings and his fame was soon eclipsed by the great Paul Robeson, who succeeded him in the role of Joe in the classic musical Show Boat. A critic from the New York Morning Telegraph described him as "a singer who can pick the heart right out of your body—if you don't look out."
Texan Margo Jones revolutionized American theatre. At a time when few professional drama companies existed outside New York, Jones fought for regional productions and new voices. Determined to create the best theatre in America, she said, "I saw no reason why I couldn't have it in Houston." In 1947, in Dallas, Jones founded America's first modern professional resident theatre, which in turn launched the regional theatre movement throughout the nation.
Poet, politician, and historian, Mirabeau B. Lamar is claimed by Texas, although he was a Georgia native and lived there for three decades. In 1838, Lamar became the second President of the Republic of Texas, inheriting a nation beset by problems that included a bankrupt treasury. Undaunted, Lamar promoted his vision of Texas as a prosperous, sprawling empire.
As a public official, suffragist, and educator, Annie Webb Blanton devoted her life to women’s rights. She said, "Everything that helps to wear away age-old prejudices contributes towards the advancement of women and of humanity." In 1918, Blanton was elected State Superintendent for Public Instruction, becoming the first woman in Texas to hold a statewide elected office.
A champion of historic preservation, prominent Texan architect O'Neil Ford decried architectural flamboyance and cliché. He was also a passionate advocate for education and the environment.
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Ford to the National Council on the Arts.
Ford died in 1982, but his ethic of simplicity, integrity, and restraint continues to inspire. "Architecture is scale and proportion," he often said. "The rest is décor."
His thousands of admirers called him a saint. His adversaries—and there were many—called him the Devil's apostle. But Waco publisher and journalist William Cowper Brann preferred to be known by the name of the weekly journal he published, the Iconoclast.
Born near Houston in 1918, Mary Kay watched her mother work long hours to support the family. At a time when few women worked outside the home, Mary Kay, too, pursued a career. She flourished as a saleswoman but quit when a man she had trained was promoted above her. In 1963, Mary Kay Ash launched her cosmetics business in Dallas with nine independent beauty consultants. Today, 2.5 million women sell her products in thirty-five countries.
Author of more than forty Westerns, the writer Elmer Kelton depicted the South Texas Plains with both romance and realism. These were qualities that Kelton knew well, having spent his entire life in the region. Kelton once explained, "I can't write about heroes seven feet tall and invincible. I write about people five feet eight and nervous."
Rabbi Henry Cohen once said, “Other men play golf for recreation. My hobby is helping people.” Cohen is perhaps best known for his role in the Galveston Movement, which brought Jewish immigrants into the Port of Galveston to settle throughout Texas and the Midwest. Cohen met immigrants at the dock and provided advice and assistance, sometimes purchasing clothing and supplies for them with his own money.
Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca first set foot on land that would become Texas in 1528, when his crude raft ran aground near Galveston Island. Cabeza de Vaca then embarked upon what one scholar described as "the most remarkable [journey] in the record of American exploration."
Connecticut-born Frederick Law Olmsted is best known for his design of New York's Central Park. But his book A Journey through Texas (1857) remains one of the most thorough and engaging nineteenth-century travel accounts of the state.
Physician and pioneering activist Héctor P. García was once described as "a man who in the space of one week delivers twenty babies, twenty speeches, and twenty thousand votes." A proud member of the Greatest Generation, García sought the inclusion of Mexican Americans into mainstream America.
Charles Goodnight liked to point out he was born in 1836, the year the Republic of Texas was founded, and moved here in 1845, the year Texas joined the United States. A legendary rancher and trailblazer, Goodnight became known as the "father of the Texas Panhandle.
Over the course of her life, Jane Y. McCallum compiled a remarkable record of public service. She was a leader in Texas women's fight for suffrage. She helped the Texas League of Women Voters fight for education, health care, and child labor laws. She served as executive secretary of the Women's Joint Legislative Council. She also served as Texas Secretary of State under two different governors.
Tejano leader José Antonio Navarro lived under five the six flags of Texas. Born in 1795 to a prominent family in San Antonio, Navarro grew up along with his city. In the 1820s, he championed Stephen F. Austin's colonization efforts. When trouble arose between the Texans and Mexico's government, Navarro was one of two Tejanos to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836.
Born in 1904 on her grandparents' ranch in Roma, Texas, pioneering folklorist and educator Jovita González felt a deep commitment to the people and culture of South Texas. She traveled throughout Cameron, Starr, and Zapata counties, interviewing residents of the borderlands. González captured the voices of ordinary Mexican Americans seeking to preserve their cultural traditions during a period of tumultuous change.
In 1683, Franciscan priest Damián Massanet left Barcelona to serve as a missionary in the New World. Massanet spent several years building missions in Mexico. Then, in 1690, he accompanied General Alonso De León, governor of the state of Coahuila, to establish a Spanish presence in Texas. Massanet's Tejas mission lasted for only three years, but it marked the first step in Spain's efforts to bring the lands of Texas under the Spanish flag
In the 1920s, writer Winifred Sanford's stories of the Texas oil boom captured the anxieties of a state on the verge of modernization.
Raised in Houston, Mickey Leland was committed to providing jobs for minorities and health care for the poor. After winning Barbara Jordan's seat in the U.S. Congress in 1978, he fought tirelessly to end global starvation.
The quiet cotton farming community of Wharton, Texas, is the touchstone for the career of playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote. He wrote plays about everyday people living in small Texas towns like his boyhood home, and his work was praised for its authenticity. "I believe very deeply in the human spirit," he once said. "I've known people that the world has thrown everything at. . . . And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and they don't ask quarters."
Writer and editor Willie Morris was born in Mississippi and made his name in New York, but he left an indelible mark on Texas journalism. Morris served as editor of the Daily Texan and the Texas Observer during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. "Texas was where I reached maturity," he later recalled. Writing about "politics, the ambivalent and exposed world of the politician . . . taught me about the complexity of human affairs, about the irrelevancy of most dogmatic formulas, about loyalty and courage and devotion to human causes."
Writer Mary Austin Holley introduced English-speaking readers of the 1830s and '40s to Texas, which she called a land of "surpassing beauty . . . a splendid country." Sadly, she died of yellow fever in 1846 and never settled in the place that had captured her heart, but her work provides invaluable accounts of life in early Texas.
According to one of his fans, actor and Texas native Zachary Scott had an air of sophistication that made him look like he had "been born in a dinner jacket." Best known for portraying scoundrels, playboys, and villains, Scott was one of Texas's most recognizable faces during Hollywood's golden age.
Scholar and folklorist John Mason Brewer was born in Goliad in 1896. Over his fifty-year career, Brewer almost single-handedly preserved the African American folklore of his home state. His books serve as a timeless record of Texas storytelling, and powerful proof of what he called "folklore as a living force."
Historian Carlos E. Castañeda changed how we think of the Southwest. Through exhaustive and groundbreaking research, he told the story of the Texas-Mexico borderlands as one of shared culture and heritage, rather than conflict and division.
Born about 1845, Comanche leader Quanah Parker lived two vastly different lives: the first as a warrior among the Plains Indians of Texas, and the second as a pragmatic leader who sought a place for his people in a rapidly changing America.
A master of color, shading, and detail, Texas painter Frank Reaugh recorded what he called "the broad opalescent prairies" as he saw them more than a century ago. His most famous works feature the Texas longhorn in its natural habitat, the Texas plains.
Born in Galveston in 1894, King Vidor grew up with the movies. Over the course of his career, he directed both silent and sound films and worked with many of Hollywood's top stars, from Charlie Chaplin to Audrey Hepburn.
According to J. Frank Dobie, the writer and naturalist Roy Bedichek "liked to cook outdoors, eat outdoors, sleep outdoors, look and listen outdoors, [and] be at one . . . with the first bob-whiting at dawn." Born in 1878 and raised in Waco, Bedichek is best known for his 1947 book Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, a classic of American nature writing.
That Houston is a destination for art lovers is due in part to the generosity of Dominique and John de Menil, a French couple who left their Nazi-occupied homeland in 1941, ultimately settling in Houston. Their museum, the Menil Collection, remains true to their vision of art as a spiritual pursuit.
African American leader Norris Wright Cuney forged a remarkable career in post-Civil War Texas. Born into slavery in 1846, he nonetheless studied law and became a civic and political force in the years following Reconstruction.
Critics call Texas-born writer Katherine Anne Porter a "poet of the story." Her carefully crafted short fiction earned her the highest acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her most accomplished stories spring from her childhood in central Texas—what she once called her "native land of the heart."
Texas revolutionary Juan Seguín was a politician, a soldier, a land speculator, a businessman, and a suspected traitor. Yet he was undoubtedly a hero and died an honored veteran. The perplexing contrasts of Seguín's life illustrate how complicated loyalty could be during the struggle for Texas independence—especially for Tejano citizens of the Republic.
Called "the Storyteller of the Southwest," James Frank Dobie was born in 1888 on a ranch in Live Oak County. Throughout his life, he lived astride two worlds: the old-time Texas of his family's cattle ranch and the state's modern centers of scholarly learning. The focus of Dobie's career was to record and publicize the disappearing folklore of the Southwest.
"Belle Starr was the most desperate woman that ever figured on the borders," declared an 1889 news report that she’d been shot dead by an assassin. Confirmed details of her life are few. But after her death at age forty, her legend grew, and she became known as "Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen."
The Gutenberg Bible, completed in 1454, is the first substantial book printed with movable type. Of the twenty-one complete copies in existence, one is on view to the public at The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. This book—and the center that houses it—are the proud legacy of Chancellor Harry Huntt Ransom, "The Great Acquisitor."
The German army considered Pointe du Hoc a perfect spot for defending the coast of France from Allied forces during WWII. The Germans placed six cannons on the point and thought the position secure. And it was—until June 1944, when Texan James Earl Rudder was ordered to take the point with his 2nd Ranger Battalion.
Born in 1867, folklorist John Lomax spent his life collecting songs "around chuck wagons, up hollers and down in river bottoms, on levee and railroad, in the saloons, churches, and penitentiaries of the South and Southwest." Upon his death in 1948, the New York Times wrote, "If anybody ever did, John Lomax really heard America singing."
In the 1920s and 1930s, Edna Ferber was one of the most widely read writers in America. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1924 novel So Big. Although Ferber's critical status has somewhat faded, her Texas epic, Giant, remains a landmark in the state's cultural history.
Born in 1878 near Tyler, Dorothy Scarborough was a respected writer, teacher, and folklorist, most often remembered today for her controversial 1925 novel The Wind.
In the south foyer of the Texas State Capitol stand two life-sized statues: one of Sam Houston, the other of Stephen F. Austin. These men helped shape the state of Texas, but their marble likenesses were shaped by the hands of Elisabet Ney, one of the state's most talented and determined artists.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 left the U.S. Navy stunned. With American ships still smoldering in the water, Navy Secretary Frank Knox turned to a Texan, Chester Nimitz, to restore confidence in the Pacific Fleet.
Known as the "First Lady of Texas," Ima Hogg was born in Mineola in 1882, the only daughter of Texas governor "Big Jim" Hogg. Miss Ima's philanthropic work reflects the breadth of her interests, but perhaps her most tangible legacy is found in the historic buildings she bequeathed to the state, each of them furnished with authentic American furniture.
Though Billy Lee Brammer’s novel The Gay Place is a work of fiction, it remains one of the most revealing accounts of Texas politics ever written. The Gay Place, which takes its title from a poem by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published in 1961 to great acclaim. The novel paints a vivid picture of the compromises, strategy, and horse-trading that we call politics. Brammer based the characters on people and places he knew in 1950s Austin.
Working as a pharmacist in Huntsville in 1901, young Minnie Fisher Cunningham discovered that her untrained male colleagues made twice her salary. That unfairness, she later explained, "made a suffragette out of me." But for Cunningham, the right to vote was only a first step. She went on to help found the National League of Women Voters, and in 1928, was the first Texas woman to run for the United States Senate.
People come from around the world to view the American art in Fort Worth's Amon Carter Museum. Carter didn’t live to see his grand museum, but he didn't build it for himself. He built it for his fellow citizens, especially those in his beloved city of Fort Worth.
Mildred Didrikson Zaharias, nicknamed "Babe" for her childhood prowess on the baseball diamond, dominated women's sports from the 1930s through the '50s. Though best remembered for her accomplishments in golf and track and field, she also excelled in basketball, diving, roller-skating, bowling, and billiards.
Born in Yucatan in 1788, Lorenzo de Zavala dedicated much of his life to creating a Federalist Mexico, with a strong constitution to guard citizens' rights. But when his former ally Santa Anna established a centralized regime in 1834 and quickly moved to suppress the Federalists, Zavala did the only thing he could to weaken the leader’s iron grip: he helped bring about the Texas Revolution.
Miriam Amanda Wallace wasn't considering a career in politics when she enrolled at Baylor Female College in the 1890s. She married James Ferguson in 1899 and settled down to raise a family. But instead of enjoying a quiet life at home, Miriam became the first woman governor of Texas.
William Sydney Porter—better known by his pen name, O. Henry—was born in North Carolina and died in New York. But his sixteen years in Texas, from 1882 to 1898, made a lasting mark on his life and work. Later in life, when he began writing fiction under an assumed name, it was his early stories about Texas that helped launch his career.
As a girl, Oveta Culp Hobby was fascinated by the world of government. As a woman, she took a leading role in that world. Her truly inspiring record of civic service includes organizing the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II and serving as the first head of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Every culture, Alan Lomax believed, has a "right . . . to equal time on the air and equal time in classrooms." As director of the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song and a radio and television host, Lomax introduced folksong from around the globe to popular audiences and promoted it among students and scholars.
William Barret Travis was only twenty-six years old when he died defending the Alamo. He came from Alabama just five years before, in 1831, leaving behind a failed career and marriage. Texas, a land he came to love, gave Travis a new life—and an early death.
On a cold March dawn in 1836, Mexican officers escorted a shaken young woman and her infant daughter past the heaps of dead in the Alamo courtyard to Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. The woman, Susanna Dickinson, was the wife of Alamo defender Almaron Dickinson. She and her baby were hiding in the Alamo's chapel when Mexican troops bayoneted her husband and took the mission.
"Remember the Alamo" was the rallying cry at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto. However by 1903, the neglected Alamo was nearly torn down and replaced by a hotel. At that point, twenty-two-year-old Clara Driscoll stepped forward with her own money to protect the sacred site. For her generosity, Driscoll is known as the "Savior of the Alamo."
"I have learned patience in the hard School of an Empresario," Stephen F. Austin wrote to his secretary in 1827. Austin had brought his first settlers to Texas six years earlier, and devoted the rest of his life to colonizing the land. Without Austin's seemingly endless patience and long years of sacrifice, Texas as we know it today would not exist.
Sam Houston arrived in Texas in 1832. The former congressman and governor of Tennessee's new cause was Texas independence. He led the army that defeated Mexican General Santa Anna at San Jacinto—an achievement that secured his place in Texas history.
Born in Galveston in 1878, Jack Johnson went on to become the greatest boxer in the world and one of America's most famous—and notorious—celebrities.
A longtime Houston resident, artist John Biggers explained that he saw his art "as a responsibility to reflect the spirit and style of the Negro people." Biggers achieved recognition as an artist for his drawings and sculptures, but he is best known for his murals, which now form a rich part of Houston's visual landscape.
A mural in the El Paso Federal Court House named "Pass of the North" typifies the work of Texas artist Tom Lea. Larger-than-life figures representing El Paso's many inhabitants range across the courthouse wall. Behind them, stark desert light illuminates a mountain range, while storm clouds sweep across the plains in the distance.
In 1966, Barbara Jordan began her historic political career when she became the first African American woman elected to the Texas Senate. Six years later, she won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first African American woman from a southern state to serve in the body.