On September 1, 2021, Texas House Bill 2497 went into effect, creating the 1836 Project advisory committee “to promote patriotic education and increase awareness of the Texas values that continue to stimulate boundless prosperity across this state.” Named after the year that began the short-lived, debt-ridden “Republic of Texas,” the 1836 Project produced a pamphlet that is distributed by the Texas Department of Public Safety at driver license offices. The pamphlet glosses over the exploitative and racist foundations of the state—like the role of slavery in the making of the Texas economy—while celebrating the violence involved, including the role of the Texas Rangers in terrorizing Mexican, Black, and Indigenous residents. Alongside crackdowns on what can and cannot be said in the classroom, the 1836 Project formalizes a long-standing propagandistic account of Texas history. This not only robs students of a real education in the classroom; it also further erodes the social fabric of the state: indoctrinating Texans (both longtime and newer) to believe in Texas’s exceptionalism, as well as the racist and settler violence and exploitation that endorse it.
Returning to 1836 is an old trick of Texas political theater. Consider the burial of the first leader of Texas as such, Stephen F. Austin, which begins Benjamin H. Johnson’s new book, Texas: An American History. The first pages are filled with elaborate ceremonies to mark Austin’s life and his death; Johnson then reveals that the year is 1910, almost a century after Austin’s founding of the Republic of Texas and death. This, we learn, is a reburial, a commemoration. Austin’s body was exhumed from a cemetery in Jones Creek, outside of Houston, and transported to the city of Austin, established as the capital city of Texas. Thus, the assertion of Texas’s exceptionality—in 1910, at the centennial, and now—requires its constant return to 1836. Johnson’s book uses this early moment of repetition and rehearsal to show how the state’s obsession with telling its own history in the present is a central political tool.
Indeed, 1836 continues to be used as a weapon to defy the US government. For instance: In January 2024, Texas Governor Greg Abbott defied federal orders on border management and referenced the broken “compact” between the US and the States, language often used by the Southern states to conjure the power of the Confederacy. The compact in question for Abbott, though, was most likely the annexation treaty that ended the Republic of Texas’s sovereign period in 1848, when the US officially absorbed the territory. Like the image of the Confederacy, 1836 Texas looms in these proclamations as a threat that can be reverted to if and when the compact is broken. Certain historical inheritances deep within Texan political culture, alleges Abbott, promise that Texas can still act on its own behalf, as its own polity. This rhetoric around past and potential secession movements is not without consequence. Such standoffs are designed to stress test the coherence and unity of the American project by drawing attention to its constitutive fault lines.
At various points in its history, the state of Texas has been framed as a political theater: an experiment in potential American futures that other states have watched with admiration or disdain. In recent years, these scenes have been cast around the management of the US–Mexico border and stage anew the conflicts between the federal and state governments. The ongoing contention plays into the propagation of racist immigration policies and laws at the federal level and, in the process, firms up a caricature of Texas: it is a place of bigness and brashness, but one whose most powerful political imaginaries are unequally distributed. It is a political gravity around which America must turn, not just vice versa.
But Texas’s exceptionalism, and its governor’s desire to rule it in a state of exception, is not the only reason that people are watching it. Texas is not just the project of its ultraconservative political elite but also a huge place with a growing population, changing demographics, and in many ways an ambivalent voting base. This makes the state less like a dangling extreme appendage and more like a microcosm of America writ large.
Why an “American history” of Texas, then? Johnson proposes that “when Americans turn on their laptops, play video games, go to church, vote, eat Tex-Mex, go on a grocery run, listen to music, grill a steak, or watch a football game, they are, knowingly or not, paying tribute to the influence of the Lone Star State.” But when he justifies that a history of Texas requires a history of the US, as well as Mexico and beyond, he is more attentive to political economic mechanisms over cultural dissemination, like “cotton prices, factionalism within Mexico, and divisions in the US over the expansion of slavery.” At their intersection is a specific set of economic drivers, political projects, regionally specific habits, and cultural attachments that make Texas recognizable as such. As Johnson puts it, this is also where Texas’s political distinctiveness comes into focus, as an image that means both more and less than the state’s actual history.
To a non-Texan, Texas: An American History might read as overly sentimental at times, but by adhering to the popular and folkloric conventions of Texas history writing, it is able to do subtle and creative work to undermine dominant stories about the state. This is in part because the book seeks to function like a textbook; it even comes with online teaching resources. The book steers away from making excuses for historical and contemporary violence, poking holes in the foundation of Texas’s myths, especially those that insist on its whiteness, conservativeness, and separateness from the rest of the US. And it does so from a macrohistorical perspective, with an eye for historical detail and a commitment to thorough source work. The result is a widely accessible general accounting of Texas as it has been shaped by—and has served to shape—the US.
But Johnson’s book is more than a chronicle of self-memorialization. It attempts to retell these Texan stories in a more measured way, revealing the contemporary political effects of glorifying just how violently Texas was settled. These bloody facts make the fixation with 1836—and Texas history more broadly—look less like political theater and more like a political laboratory for the US: a place of experimentation with policy reform.
Consider how Project 2025 springs from the same roots as the 1836 Project. Texas’s political experiments are nowhere more on display than in the mechanisms and materials of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a conservative think tank. TPPF has self-consciously attempted to set the agenda for both Texas and the rest of the US for decades, with a focus on education reform and policy. In 2013, it even published something of a how-to guide: The Texas Model: Prosperity in the Lone Star State and Lessons for America. Kevin Roberts, the leader of Project 2025 at The Heritage Foundation, cut his teeth at TPPF. So did Brooke Rollins, Donald Trump’s secretary of agriculture, who founded the America First Policy Institute, a newer but influential think tank on the political scene that has overtaken The Heritage Foundation in the last year or so. And Roberts’s and Rollins’s experiences in Texas reflect a wider pattern of political experimentation with “liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise” in the US.
Johnson’s is not a story of unbridled optimism but a history that attends to pockets of resistance, to the formation of political power that got in the way, and to the wider violence embedded in Texas without glorifying it in turn.
Since the start of the 21st century, Texas has rolled back abortion rights, cracked down on mask mandates, reformed gun legislation, and delivered tax cuts for the unbelievably wealthy. Such radical reworking of American society isn’t just achieved but also celebrated on a big stage in Texas. Yes, Florida is even more important, culturally and socially, to Trump’s presidency at this point, but the arrival of Elon Musk, himself only recently “Texasified,” in the Trump inner circle suggests the future-oriented extractive opportunities (SpaceX) are predicated on specific pasts, like that of Texas, and from the backward-looking orientation of “Make America Great Again.”
Johnson helps us historicize this, not with an ahistorical insistence on Texas’s conservativism but rather with a set of stories that reveal the wider range of political ideologies, practices, and experiments here. Texas: An American History does not set out to be a record of policy reform or conflicting ideological commitments to “liberty.” However, in its attention to the longue durée and its ambivalent attachment to the image of Texas, the book quietly delivers evidence of a strange political laboratory in the shape of the Lone Star State.
Texas histories tend to start long before the land became a state. But they do so with a strange acknowledgment of the various and overlapping forms of sovereignty that have been put into place in what we now call Texas.
For example, Raymond Campbell’s Gone to Texas begins with a story that starts over 10,000 years ago when people are thought to have come across the Bering Strait from Asia, all the way down to Texas. Although scientists debate the precise story of the peopling of the Americas, these contested Texas beginnings might look like recognition of a precolonial moment, when several nomadic and sedentary Indigenous groups lived across the land; but it also ends up projecting the image of Texas’s state lines thousands of years before they would be drawn or mean anything at all. These histories then list Texas’s colonial projects. Among the Spanish and the French and the English, and between the 16th and 18th centuries, there were attempts to set up settlements in Texas with different political ideologies and aims. Johnson traces this as a circuitous history not of conquest but of failure, confusion, and ultimately contingency.
This is how he takes us into the 19th century, a period of tumultuous territorial claim making at the end of the Spanish empire and in the future state of Texas. He describes how people who had “gone to Texas” from elsewhere in the US, usually described as white Anglo settlers, and some from Europe, namely Germany, forged alliances with those already settled there, with the Mexican government, some with American trading partners, and others with the Comanche, whose empire crossed Mexican and American territory.
The 1836 Project would you have you think that, at this point, the white Anglo settlers—the good guys and the underdogs in this landscape—staged a ragtag coup and emerged victorious over the draconian Mexican government and all of the chaos that reigned in this region, creating a true American settlement, a place for capital to flourish and for newfound settlers to shore up their claims to their land.
But Johnson’s account does not rely on the conventions of a story of heroes and villains. Instead, Texas: An American History shows that as Mexico moved to abolish slavery after it declared independence in 1821, white Anglo settlers mounted a counterrevolution, managing what Johnson takes great pains to clarify was a surprising and mostly tentative claim to independence from Mexico. In a series of chaotic battles in 1836, these counterrevolutionaries declared a new territory for a slavery-based political economy in the name of liberty.
As the 1836 Project would have it, there is an inescapable sense of fatedness to the Republic of Texas. It was doomed to fail. On this point, Johnson seems to agree. The 1836 Project stages this failure as a kind of tragic play that memorializes sovereign Texas and its ideological commitments as an aspirational state always worth aiming for. Johnson, however, sees the formation of the republic as a strange, flailing political strategy. He shows that even Texas’s leaders seemed to anticipate its failure from the get-go. This is because the republic, which would exist for only nine years, could not survive on its own.
Texas had to seek out trading partners for its newfound cotton economy while keeping a militia functional, ostensibly to protect its colonies from the Comanche; those who escaped enslavement to go to Mexico; the dispossessed Apache, Kiowas, and other Indigenous groups; and a perceived threat from the increasingly consolidated Mexican state. In doing so, the republic accrued crushing debt. The strategy of interest is how and with whom Texas made its allegiances, first economically and then politically. Texas sought support from England, the greatest consumer of cotton in the world. When this failed due to England’s abolition movement, Texas turned to the US, which was more divided on the matter of the slavery regime at the time. Johnson describes a set of diplomatic moves that hinged on arguments for economic prosperity as what enabled the US decision to absorb Texas and its plantation slavery regime in 1845, forgiving the republic’s debt and starting a war with Mexico as a result.
After the conclusion of the Mexican-American War with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Texas would become a successful cotton-producing American state for approximately 13 years before joining the Confederacy and fighting for secession again, now from the US. The end of this period is marked by the now-federal holiday Juneteenth, a historically Black Texan–specific celebration of the end of slavery. Even with the granting of land as freedom colonies to formerly enslaved families, the Reconstruction period after the Civil War would reconsolidate forms of white loyalty to Texas’s 1836 image of itself, now materialized less in the economic potentials of cotton plantations and more in other modes of extraction enabled by its property regime.
This, Johnson shows in his chapters “A White Man’s Country,” “Home on the Range,” and “Taming the Frontier,” was a foreclosure of Indigenous land claims too and gave way to the boom of the cattle industry, which would take over in Texas’s narration of its past. The fencing in and policing of property, and the institutionalization of private property as such, did indeed make Texas what it is today, but not through a victorious every-man-for-himself settlement of the wild wild west. Rather, as Johnson shows, first the land was stolen and then, on behalf of its vulnerable settlements, the state had to make allegiances and concessions in order to fantasize about its right to land as God-given in perpetuity.
It is in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that Johnson locates the seeds of alternative political movements in Texas. For example, the chapter “The People’s Party” traces the Farmers’ Alliance and its populist politics in the 1880s and 1890s. Its activities were ultimately short lived, so Johnson gives himself some space to speculate:
Had their policies been enacted and worked at least to a degree, more Texans would have owned their land (and perhaps remained on farms and in small towns). Cooperative businesses, trade unions, and social organizations would have left a much larger stamp on economics and social life, as they did later in Germany and Nordic countries with strong cooperative movements. The Black fifth of the population would have continued to enjoy more political rights, like voting, and tangible benefits of power such as well-funded schools, that a white supremacist Democratic party denied them with discriminatory laws and horrific mob violence.
In the absence of this kind of structural endurance, Johnson argues that nevertheless, some of the tactics formed by the People’s Party would later propel Lyndon B. Johnson all the way to the White House.
But Johnson is careful to note that there are also legacies of progressive projects in Texas that had a wider impact in the state and outside of it. He traces two important legal battles that started in Texas: Roe v. Wade (1973) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003). Jane Roe was a pseudonym for Norma McCorvey, a woman seeking an abortion in Texas in 1969. Until recently, this famous case was used as a precedent to protect women’s right to abortion care as part of a “right to privacy.” Forty years later, John Geddes Lawrence Jr.’s case also used a “right to privacy” argument to strike down state bans on consensual sex between adults. The resulting Supreme Court decision ruled that it is unconstitutional for US states to criminalize sodomy. These landmark legal battles for the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people were fought over questions of liberty in classic Texan fashion. The former was repealed on these terms, in the liberal grammar of freedom, too. Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has unfortunately also been a place where those liberties find some of their ends.
Repetition is important there and then, here and now. Why else would there be a need to make America great again? The return to 1836 and its insistence on remembering the past in certain ways is essential to the political project that is Greg Abbott’s Texas. This nostalgia is a constitutive element of the political formation of the present.
But Johnson has done the labor to show that Texas was not always as ultraconservative as it has been over the last few decades and that when its conservativism has won out, it has been due to a variety of social, political, and cultural pressures—not fate. He goes to great pains to show a wider variety of political projects that have occurred and could have occurred in this place. In more propagandistic incantations for political purposes, Texas’s history, based on disavowal, denial, and silence, becomes part of a frictionless nostalgia for its past and the so-called freedom that might have existed there, in favor of a particular American future.
One could claim that its obsession with history is foundational to Texas’s conservativism, and maybe also American conservativism, but obviously a historical perspective is not only that held by conservatives. See Johnson’s work. History is a space of contestation over necessity and contingency. This territory should not be seceded, especially not to nostalgia. Texas: An American History holds on to the past to reveal moments when questions about liberty, which is fundamental to conservativism in Texas and beyond it, were articulated and rearticulated on behalf of different political projects. It was not always a story of continuous or even incremental conquest. As the world lives through another Trump presidency, whatever that comes to mean, the least we can do is make sure that the freedom he vows to protect, especially through isolationist measures, does not remain an unmarked myth about the US past.
But this is increasingly difficult. Almost every educational institution has been put under strain in the last decade in Texas. Book bans have altered classroom dynamics, lawsuits have been flung at the Texas State Historical Society, and university employees specializing in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have been fired. Outside of the classroom, the Texas legislature has sponsored the 1836 Project, which leverages a history of victory in Texas to do more and more political work.
Within the domain of what happened, what needn’t have happened, and what is to come, the book is thus an interesting artifact itself. Texas: An American History was produced in a time of heated debates over freedom of expression when it comes to historical storytelling. It asks for another kind of liberty that does not demand that America be first, or that Texas stand alone. Instead, Johnson instills in his reader a sense that things might yet be different, that there is still a reason to want and make and fight for more history.
Johnson’s is not a story of unbridled optimism but a history that attends to pockets of resistance, to the formation of political power that got in the way, and to the wider violence embedded in Texas without glorifying it in turn. Johnson makes his readers confront historical patterns in Texas so that they can better recognize particularly insidious forms of repetition in the state and on the national stage when they see them. This is indeed a kind of hopefulness: finding hope in the capacities of people to wield their history. It is also an insistence that combating propagandistic approaches to history requires more and better history.
To see what more looks like, we can look at the project that Johnson co-created and has been a collaborator on for many years: Refusing to Forget. This group of academics have been developing public history materials on state-sanctioned violence against Mexican-identified people on the Texas–Mexico border, creating traveling exhibits, social media campaigns, and historical markers that rub up against and scratch the gloss of the 1836 Project. Repetition is also the tool of Refusing to Forget: it insists on returning to the past, sitting with it, telling its stories, and making sure that if we are going to be watching Texas, we are going to hear all its stories. 