Thomas Alter is Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University. This interview is based on his new book, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press, 2022). JF: What led you...
Texas history
Heather Cox Richardson on rewriting history
Earlier this month I wrote a long post on complexity and revisionism in the doing of history. Over at Milwaukee Independent, historian Heather Cox Richardson discusses the importance of rewriting history. She writes in the context of a recent revisionist...
A new Battle of the Alamo?
Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford recently published Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. It has a provocative title and an even more provocative argument: Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas...
Juneteenth is the answer to Frederick Douglass’s question: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”
Here is historian Peniel Joseph at CNN: Juneteenth commemorates the June 19, 1865, announcement of the end of slavery by a Union major general in Texas. Long celebrated in Black communities from coast to coast, it has been a Texas state holiday...