The Culture

Spanish Class

In the market for high-quality handmade Hispanic crafts? You’ll find them—and more—at Santa Fe’s famous fair.

Davy Crock?

New York fireman Bill Groneman is disputing a critical piece of Alamo lore—and historians everywhere are burning mad.

Lost Kingdom

A trip to Guatemalan jungle reveals the splendid ruins of Tikal and the mystereries of the ancient Maya.

Les Misérables

We set out to teach the French about real Texas chili. We ended up eating a big bowl of crow.

Dazed and Discovered

Sometimes stars are found in the unlikeliest places.

Good Humor Man

Ace Reid was the greatest cowboy cartoonist in the world; I laughed at his jokes and was honored to be his friend.

Adopted Son

Legendary humorist Will Rogers was from Oklahoma, but he never met a Texas he didn’t like.

Holding the Fort

In 1731 the Spanish presidio of Los Adaes became the first capital of Texas. Today no one recognizes the name.

Goliad’s Ghosts

At Goliad, you can walk among the ghosts of Fannin’s men and the echoes of the rallying cry that history forgot.

Focus: Local Color

With the suddenness of a revolution, Texas changed from a cultural colony to a hot spot for homegrown artists.

On Assignment: Picture This

The Standard Oil Collection captured details of everyday life in the forties and, in 1981, helped us to understand modern Texas.

Scrapbook

Remembering the Alamo, Candy Barr, J. Frank Dobie, and Farrah. Forgetting James Michener’s Texas.

Essay: Remembrance of Things Primitive

This One’s a Beaut!

How a Fort Worth glass manufacturer became a modern-day medici.

Lights! Camera!

Action abounds in the new slide show at the San Jacinto Monument, but the view of history falls a bit short.

Little House on the Plaza

John Neely Bryan’s cabin may be a fake, but as Dallas’ only claim to the past, it’s a beloved fake.

Wouldn’t You Like To Be a Pepper Too?

A Dublin bottler is the only one in Texas who’s still sweet on traditional Dr. Pepper.

A Slaughter, A Smuggled Painting, and A Raid

A customs seizure raises a perplexing question: Who owns our past-Texas or Mexico?

Can’t Win for Losing

When San Antonio’s Memorial Minutemen took on a crosstown rival, all they had to lose was their chance to go down in history as Texas’ worst high school football team.

Remembering the Sabbath

In the fifties a Baptist minister’s daughters were expected to be models of piety—clean, demure, virginal, and impervious to the lure of secular pleasures like makeup and TV.

Family Trees

Outside of town, in the Big Thicket, lived Texas’ most exotic wildlife—and most of it was human.

Staying in Line

A group of dancers from Garland, aged 57 to 90, would rather rock on than rock in a chair.

The Museum That Time Forgot

It’s one of the best-kept secrets in the state. But what the Texas Memorial Museum needs is somebody’s attention.

The Anglo-Tex Connection

A Dallasite enamored of British class gets her sesquicentennial wish—a Texas embassy in London.

Mikey

He left his parents’ house in search of a world where things were black and white, where there were heroes and villains. What he found in the slums of Port Arthur was a world that would tolerate people like him-and take advantage of them.

Trivial Texas

Three Texas Trivia games separate Lone Star zealots from ordinary believers.

Local Menu Makes Good

Here’s to the unsung heroes of Eastland: my grandfather and his V.C. menu.

In the Boredom of the Storm

Hurricane Alicia roared through Houston, but somehow it seemed much more real on TV than it did outside my hotel room window.

Texas Primer: Conjunto

Tex plus Mex plus electric guitar plus accordion equals... art.

Big Wheels and the Silver Spike

It wasn’t business that drew the state’s top politicians to a Trans-Pecos ranch. Their mission: to mark the centennial of the train that linked Texas to the West.

Texas Primer: The Dallas Model

The sweetheart of the Apparel Mart: where she came from and where she’s going.

Texas Primer: The Pecan

Plant it, sit in its shade, but most of all, feast on its fruit.

The Armadillo’s Last Waltz

The imminent demise of Austin’s famed music hall already has Texans singing the Armadillo homesick blues.

Hello, Walls

When is a wall not a wall? When it's a work of art.

Goats Need Love, Too.

Once you let a goat in your life, you can never get it out.

Coping

Living in the country is all you ever wanted—and probably more than you bargained for.

The Best Sportswriter in Texas

Hint: his initials are B.S.

Close Encounters of the Lone Star Kind

In 1973, when Palacios Mayor W. C. Jackson invited extraterrestrials to visit Texas (“No one has ever made those fellas welcome,” he told reporters), his hospitality came almost a century too late. Long before anyone had heard of Roswell, flying saucers were first spotted in Texas in 1878, according

Texas Music News

Willie Nelson, Beck, Lisa Loeb, SwingSeparated at Beck: Some of you may have caught Willie Nelson’s appearance last week on “The Tonight Show” where he held the stage with one of LA’s most original artists, Beck. There’s an interesting story behind that collaboration and behind that whole night in

Burritos in Bosnia

What’s the easiest way to get to Texas? Well, I reckon that depends on your locale at any given moment. Ringo Starr might have said to take a left at Oklahoma but I think it’s easier if you look for the big blue stars above the front door just

Rauschenberg’s Repartee

The artist’s retrospective show in Houston made Jen Scoville laugh.

Texas Music Source

Texas music is as diverse as its people. Nineteenth-century immigrants to Texas from the American South, from Mexico, and Europe, shaped a variety of sounds unmatched anywhere else in the United States. Southern blues and ragtime, Mexican orquesta, the waltzes and polkas of Central Europe, all took root, thrived,

The Pecan

Along about May the nuts begin to form, in close-growing clusters at the tips of stubby twigs. Inside each green husk is a droplet of nutrient-filled liquid—the substance that will eventually become a pecan. As the kernel takes on shape and size, a papery skin develops around the jellylike matter.

The Texas Institute of Letters

An uneasy peace has long existed between Texas and literature, a peace the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL) has tried for fifty years to preserve and protect. Threats have been constant. In several cases, foreign emissaries have found themselves treated in alarming ways. British poet Stephen Spender, invited to speak

Appetite for Destruction

Rivers of fire. Gnashing metal claws. Burning buildings. Army surplus rocket engines and abstract mechanical dinosaurs. Lumbering steel insects armed with flamethrowers and rotating cow skulls.A capacity crowd of 5,000 Texans packed Longhorn Speedway to witness the spectacle—a chaotic evening of well-managed explosions, choreographed pyromania and all-purpose destruction—courtesy of