Former roper and country music singer Larry Callies was always a cowboy at heart, but when he was growing up, he rarely saw any representations of Black cowboys, despite a rich history. So in 2017, he founded the Black Cowboy Museum, which features a collection of
In marking the Rangers’ bicentennial, we should engage with critiques of the organization’s history and have more open, honest discussions.
As Texas Rangers’ 2023 bicentennial approaches, debates around the Rangers’ legacy become urgent again.
It is time to address Ranger history thoroughly so the many wounds done to communities across Texas can finally be addressed.
How does the Texas Rangers’ legacy as frontier lawmen affect the men and women who wear the badge today?
At the turn of the century, Mexican American publications paid a price for challenging the local sheriff and elements of the Texas Rangers.
The truth is more nuanced, and more instructive, than the myth.
The Texas Rangers face a reckoning at the Capitol—and go on to become pop-culture heroes.
The Mexican Revolution gave the Texas Rangers a new calling. But it also became the darkest chapter in Rangers history.
The historic partnership became pop-culture lore, but Texas’s broken promises to the tribe illustrated a different reality.
From Enchanted Rock to Fort Parker to the Guadalupe Mountains, we trace three early Ranger legends that mean very different things depending on whose history you claim as your own.
On the first episode of ‘White Hats,’ we visit the museum that tells the Rangers’ official history, then drive to South Texas to hear about efforts to bring other perspectives into the mainstream.
A bitter feud is pitting Hondo Crouch’s descendants against longtime locals as well as encroaching developers.
How a San Antonio restaurant manager pioneered the art of taco diplomacy.
The ride greeted families at Playland Park in San Antonio before it was disbanded and sold. Now an Austin entrepreneur is putting it back together again.
A hundred years ago, U.S. airmail pilots depended on a coast-to-coast bread-crumb trail of arrows—though most have been destroyed, buried, lost, or forgotten.
How Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka held the powerful to account—and made Texas a better place.
As rains fall across Texas, remember the 1976 Houston deluge that improbably shut down an Astros game at the famed “weather-proof” Astrodome.
In recent years, Seguin has honored the group with memorials. My father agreed to build one—but then started having second thoughts.
Okay, so it’s not a magic vehicle, but the fast-talking tour guide covers Houston’s neighborhoods from an open-air school bus.
Bobby Sakowitz dressed Houston’s most stylish through the seventies and eighties boom years. Then things went bust.
The 99-year-old North Texas musician stumped for LBJ, toured with the USO, and still recalls hundreds of tunes.
A museum in San Felipe, 40 miles west of Houston, commemorates the unique history behind Stephen F. Austin’s founding colony.
Joe Nocera’s pitched profile of then-little-known T. Boone Pickens got him unprecedented access to Pickens’s 1982 attempt to take over Cities Service.
The legendary cattle empire had been largely closed off from the outside world until the magazine’s founding editor gained access to King Ranch.
It may not have been safe, but it sure was fun.
The Texas Heritage Museum at Hill College has grown into a nationally recognized collection specializing Civil War history.
Over several years, Richard West spent two months in seven Texas locales. His reporting eventually won the National Magazine Award.
Galveston was once the Ellis Island of the South. But Jewish arrivals had to navigate a society marked by racial and religious politics.
The seventh-generation Texan is roaming the state in her van, registering voters—and digging into her family's history in the long struggle for voting rights.
Gene Fernandez has an outfit for every story, but his infectious love for local history is the star of the show.
Northeast Texas–born Byron Bennett was one of four key researchers on the team that created the lifesaving vaccine, but the spotlight shone only on Jonas Salk.
Greg Curtis’s first story about Sam Corey was supposed to be a colorful human interest piece, but in some ways it was actually the beginning of a heinous murder.
Joey Sanchez and Eric Maier are behind the Blue Tile Project, a movement to locate and restore the original tile street signs across the Bayou City.
He was the magazine’s first big hire and—over the next few decades—delivered some of its most memorable stories.
A popular columnist embeds herself inside the exclusive world of girls’ summer camps.
A pair of Texas Monthly writers chronicle an emerging scene that would end up defining a city and changing American music forever.
Bill Broyles—now best known as a Hollywood screenwriter—remembers the magazine’s first issue.
How a simple, two-chord song written by an Iowan became (clap clap clap clap) our unofficial state anthem.
Archaeologists are uncovering new clues at a canyon where ancient Texans once hunted bison en masse.
Once eaten by woolly mammoths, and later used by Indigenous Texans and settlers for its sturdy wood, this strange plant has spread from Texas across the country.
Performing death-defying trapeze stunts in drag, he shocked Parisian audiences.
Need help saddling your 1,300-pound dromedary? The Southwest Camel Conference is the place to be.
How an Amarillo oilman stole the mask right off the Lone Ranger’s face, and made one of film’s most infamous failures in the process.
Olivewood Cemetery is the resting ground of many Houston trailblazers and an important piece of the history of the African diaspora.
Decades after the Wichita County town saved its stadium from an oilman’s plan to drill at midfield, the structure has been condemned—after pipes once donated by oil companies rusted out.
A recent tribute in Archer City gave Texans an overdue opportunity to pay their respects to their state’s greatest writer.
Ann Richards, Farrah Fawcett, Beyoncé. An excerpt from TM’s new book, ‘Being Texan,’ explores a strain of toughness in the iconography of the state’s females.
Owners and employees of five haunted hotels describe their most unsettling encounters with less-than-corporeal guests.
The UT historian and newly minted MacArthur fellow wants justice for victims and their descendants.
