Meet Dora DuFran and her cat house of Deadwood; Perle De Vere and the working girls of Cripple Creek; Annie Chambers of Kansas City; and Squirrel Tooth Alice of Sweetwater. In the wild west, prostitution was one of the few career options for women. Western history is filled with many colorful tales of shady ladies and legendary madams. [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive on Sep 21, 2008 - 15 comments

Texas Beyond History is a comprehensive web site covering the last 10,000 years of human occupation of (what is now called) Texas. A small section of the site was previously posted on Metafilter. via archaeolog.
posted by Rumple on Feb 19, 2008 - 7 comments

Learn how the most opulent casino in the North American hemisphere, complete with guard turrets and escape tunnels, became a Baptist College in 1956. [more inside]
posted by punkfloyd on Dec 3, 2007 - 13 comments

Jack Jackson, writing as Jaxon, may have created the first underground comic, God Nose, in 1964. In 1969 he was one of the founders of RipOff Press. Jackson's work at that time included horror stories (in Skull Comics, RipOff's tribute to EC) and political fare. Jackson returned to his native Texas in the 70s and began work on a series of comics on Texas history. In 1979 he published Comanche Moon, the story of the abduction of Cynthia Ann Parker and of her son, the great Comanche chief Quanah Parker. Jackson was influenced by Texas History Movies, a 1920s comic strip by Jack Patton and John Rosenfeld that was compiled into booklets and used in Texas schools until the 1960s. Other works by Jackson included the story of Spanish-Americans in the war for Texas independence, the Alamo as seen from both sides, and a look at Sam Houston's relationship with the Cherokee. The subjects of Jackson's comics tended to be history's dispossessed and, in 1998, he published Lost Cause, a look at post-Civil War white Texans. Accused of racism, Jackson replied that he intended to show history as it was, not as people wanted it to have been. The Comics Reporter: "Jackson's Texas was capable of grotesquery and atrocity because Jackson's art was able to communicate extreme, transcendent moments without hesitation or shame." Aside from comics, Jackson wrote a number of books on Texas and other history, including the award-winning Los Mestenos, a study of Spanish ranching in Texas. He was a lifetime member of the Texas State Historical Society. Jackson's health deteriorated as he grew older and he suffered from diabetes and prostate cancer. On June 8, Jack Jackson committed suicide near the Stockton, Texas cemetery where his parents are buried.
posted by CCBC on Jul 26, 2006 - 19 comments

Today is Texas Independence Day On March 2, 1836, the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed at Washington-on-the-Brazos. The document was created by the Convention of 1836 while almost a couple hundred brave Texans at the Alamo held Gen. Santa Anna's army of several thousand at bay for 13 days. On March 6, the Alamo finally fell, slaughtered to the last man. On March 27, 352 Texas soliders were slaughtered at the Goliad Massacre. Finally on April 21, the untrained armies of Texas, outnumbered and under the command of Sam Houston, decisively defeated the much larger and better trained and equipped Army of Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto and captured the Mexican dictator Santa Anna. Happy Texas Independence Day.
posted by dios on Mar 2, 2006 - 89 comments

Austin Postcard. Photographs, postcards, history and ephemera related to Austin, Texas.
posted by plep on Aug 29, 2003 - 21 comments

First there was the evolution in schools thing. Now, people are complaining about history books (in Texas no less), with such problems as "Margie Raborn said she wants all U.S. government books to describe the United States as a republic based on biblical beliefs."
posted by benjh on Jul 22, 2002 - 26 comments

Textbook Publishers Learn to Avoid Messing With Texas. "Out of Many," the work of four respected historians, is one of the biggest sellers among American history college textbooks in the United States, but it is not likely to be available to Texas high school students taking advanced placement history. Conservative groups in Texas objected to two paragraphs in the nearly 1,000-page text that explained that prostitution was rampant in cattle towns during the late 19th century, before the West was fully settled.
posted by ncurley on Jun 30, 2002 - 24 comments