Richard Parker<\/a> said it even more boldly: \u201cSimply put, the origin story of America, usually told as starting in the East, at Plymouth Rock, and extending to the West is wrong \u2026The first European Thanksgiving was not in Massachusetts; it took place on the banks of the Rio Grande twenty-two years earlier.\u201d <\/p>\nWho are we to argue?<\/p>\n
We Texans love our state history and legends. \u201cTexas history was taught in Texas schools before the study of the United States began,\u201d wrote T.R. Fehrenbach in \u201cLone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not thinking big enough<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s\u00a0 what worries us, though: Lately, the state\u2019s official approach to Texas history has been less about curiosity and more a tool of control and censorship. Beyond just a social studies rewrite, Texas Republicans in office today have been tightening their grip on the state\u2019s mythic narrative.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The most high-profile effort has been the 1836 Project, an advisory committee the Texas Legislature created in 2022, to promote \u201cpatriotic education\u201d in our state history for students and also, oddly, drivers getting their licenses at the DMV. But there has also been a coup of sorts, roiling the state historical association and college campuses, now trickling down to elementary school classrooms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s the problem with the version of Texas history that politicians are trumpeting? In an embarrassingly un-Texan fashion, they\u2019re not thinking big enough. They focus too tightly on certain details while missing the wider view. Maybe that\u2019s because Texas history, explored deeply and in all its complicated richness, might not tell the story they want kids to hear.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 1836 Project and its ilk build a road through our state lore \u2014 a freeway that barrels along until it arrives at the capitalistic, low-regulation, business-friendly wonderland that plenty of Texans today celebrate \u2014 including, when appropriate, this editorial board. But that version of history is like glimpsing Houston from the car window as you speed around the Grand Parkway. What you see is real. It\u2019s not wrong. But when the ride is over, you wouldn\u2019t really have come to know Houston.<\/p>\n
What we\u2019re proposing \u2014 what historians and journalists have proposed \u2014 is to get off the freeway. Take the streets. Heck, get out of the car altogether and feel the uneven sidewalks beneath your feet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
More Texans<\/p>\n
Texas history is Texans, and the politicians\u2019 version too often leaves out too many of the interesting ones. They fixate on the Big Tex-sized legends that are Stephen F. Austin, William Barret Travis and Sam Houston, but underplay or ignore our state\u2019s stubborn, outsized independent streak from many, many other people of Texas who came before us \u2014 whether it was Caddo peoples joining together to erect houses in the Piney Woods or the men and women who escaped slavery. The women who kept the Lone Star dream alive during the Runaway Scrape or aspiring Texans from across the Sabine River and Atlantic Ocean alike. Untold numbers of freedom seekers have called this land home.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Little about life came easy here. And yet all those left-out Texans\u00a0 declared independence in their own ways, shaping the state we know today. These are the stories we intend to explore here in \u201cDeclaring Independence,\u201d a series of pieces rethinking Texas history, drawing on historical scholarship and contemporary reporting to show the messy, complicated, contradictory and still wildly relevant reality of our state\u2019s past. The series \u2014 which starts right here, today \u2014\u00a0 will culminate on July 4, the day of the 250th celebration of the nation\u2019s Independence Day.<\/p>\n
Because we\u2019re thinking bigger than the 1836 Project, we may not arrive at the same conclusions. But we basically share the thesis it laid out in its handy DMV-ready pamphlet:\u00a0<\/p>\n
The people that were born here or came here have made Texas. What seemed like an inhospitable zone to many has proved to be a land of promise to those with fortitude and nerve. This is their story \u2014 and yours.<\/p>\n
We would amend that mission statement only slightly, broadening it to a size befitting Texas, a state too big, too important and too ornery to be officially squashed down into a single story, a\u00a0 single point of view.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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We think the sentence should be:<\/p>\n
These are their stories \u2014 and yours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Texas flag moves up Congress Avenue toward the Capitol carried by UT’s Alpha Phi Omega during the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-257005","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-texas","9":"tag-texas-headlines","10":"tag-texas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}