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My family and their hometown helped change LBJ’s views on equal rights. Did his later policies change the reality for those in South Texas?
My family and their hometown helped change LBJ’s views on equal rights. Did his later policies change the reality for those in South Texas?
In 2011 Callie Quinn moved from Austin to Chile to experience a new way of life. Then she met a charming fellow foreigner—and almost lost everything.
It was part musical, part dance movie, and part love story, and in June 1980 it unleashed an unprecedented fervor for country music, Western wear, and, yes, mechanical bulls. More than three decades later, the film’s stars (including John Travolta, Debra Winger, Mickey Gilley, and Johnny Lee) and many Gilley’s regulars recall the movie that made America fall in love with Texas.
Paul Burka bids farewell to Texas Monthly—and wonders what happened to the Texas he once knew.
Growing up in the Permian Basin, I thought I had a sense of what it was like working the oilfields. Turns out I didn’t know a damn thing.
Five Rio Grande Valley–based reporters talk about covering the drug war in Mexico over the past decade.
A ranching photo essay.
Why we will always worship the ground we walk on.
He’s the brashest, most generous, most foul-mouthed trial attorney in the country. And at 89, Joe Jamail can still command a courtroom, mother%*!$#@.
When the 85-year-old matriarch of a prominent pecan-farming clan in San Saba was murdered, her death shook the town—and exposed how obsession and greed can fell a family from within.
Buddy Holly’s trademark black-rimmed glasses were a key part of his public persona. But he was too blind to see it that way at first.
Lone Star was just a brew for dads and cowboys, until Jerry Retzloff helped turn it into the coolest beer in the country.
The photographer from Big Bend known for stunning landscapes gets out of his comfort zone. Here, a first look at several images from his latest collection.
For more than a decade, Michelle Lyons’s job required her to watch condemned criminals be put to death. After 278 executions, she won't ever be the same.
Thirty years ago, Texans who equated fine dining with chicken cordon bleu and trout meunière suddenly found themselves eating barbecued Gulf shrimp and goat cheese quesadillas. An oral history of the Southwestern cuisine revolution.
On June 21, 1974, on a strip of ranchland alongside Interstate 40, an American icon was born.
How Johnny Gimble became one of the greatest fiddlers of all time—and showed me and my son a thing or two about playing music.
Forty years later, I still can’t forget sitting in a darkened theater to watch “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” with the movie’s leading man.
After a career that’s spanned more than thirty years, George Strait is wrapping up his 48-stop farewell tour this month. For those of us whose lives he has captured so inimitably in song, country music will never be the same.
Every year, some of Mexico’s very best matadors travel to a remote South Texas bullring—one of the few in this country—for no-kill fights. Their pageantry draws spectators by the busload.
Tejanos at the Alamo.
How did rapper Bun B become Houston’s unofficial mayor?
Sure, you can catch an awesome wave on the Texas coast, you just have to be patient. And clever. And patient . . .
How did Guy Clark become the most revered songwriter in Nashville? One hard-won tune at a time.
My life with horses.
The wild and powerful tarpon once ruled the seas off Port Aransas. Why did the ancient fish disappear? And could they make a comeback?
Ten years after their remarkable fall from grace, no one is quite sure why the onetime Nashville darlings tumbled so far—and never got back up.
He was a world-renowned piano prodigy whose romanticism and technical virtuosity inspired thousands and famously helped thaw the Cold War. But as a visit to his hometown of Kilgore made clear to me, Van Cliburn was also a Texan, a Southerner, a Baptist, a patriot, and a man who loved
After decades as one of the most admired athletes on the planet and one of the toughest competitors ever to ride a bike, Lance Armstrong is facing a new challenge: how to come back from a very public disgrace.
Most guitars don’t have names. This one has a voice and a personality, and bears a striking resemblance to his owner.
Bobby Jackson has taught students in the Aransas County school district about the Plains Indians, the Battle of San Jacinto, and Spindletop since the state celebrated its sesquicentennial. How he does it bears no resemblance to the class I took when I was stuck in middle school.
On 50,000 acres that they have mostly to themselves (not including their hounds, mules, horses, cattle, chickens, piglets, and parents), Jasper, Trevor, and Tanner Klein live a life almost untouched by the modern world.
Even after I moved to Los Angeles, there was no question that I’d always be a Texan at heart. But what about my daughter?
My daughter is only two, but I’m already planning to teach her what it means to be a Texan—and a Tejana.
Over the past year, state photographer Wyman Meinzer has roamed the Big Empty, documenting the drought’s toll. Will he ever take another pretty picture?
Bad as the current drought is, it has yet to match the most arid spell in Texas history. Nearly two dozen survivors of the fifties drought remember the time it never rained.
In 2004 Dan Rather tarnished his career forever with a much-criticized report on George W. Bush’s National Guard service. Eight years later, the story behind the story can finally be told: what CBS’s top-ranking newsman did, what the president of the United States didn’t do, and how some feuding Texas
In 1996 a powerful South Texas ranching clan accused ExxonMobil of sabotaging wells on the family’s property. Thirteen years, millions of dollars in legal fees, and one state Supreme Court opinion later, the biggest oil field feud of its time is still raging.
Texas Parks and Wildlife has embarked on an ambitious plan to restore the desert bighorn sheep population in Big Bend Ranch State Park. To accomplish this goal, the department has had to make hard choices about which animals live, which animals die, and what truly belongs in the Trans-Pecos.
Forty years ago, Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff, and a whole host of Texas misfits grew their hair long, snubbed Nashville, and brought the hippies and rednecks together. The birth of outlaw country changed country music forever.
Somehow, as every other major airline went bankrupt, slashed its workforce, or grounded planes, Southwest Airlines kept flying high. Today, Southwest is the country’s largest domestic carrier. So how does a feisty underdog vanquish its competitors and dominate a thoroughly beleaguered industry? One Kick Tail-a-Gram at a time.
John Mueller was the heir to one of the great Texas barbecue dynasties. Aaron Franklin was an unknown kid from College Station who worked his counter. John had it all and then threw it all away. Aaron came out of nowhere to create the state’s most coveted brisket. Then John
Police had all but given up looking into a pair of assaults against two prostitutes in the Houston neighborhood of Acres Homes. But when a third turned up dead, investigator Darcus Shorten embarked on a search that revealed a brutal reality.
How Matthew McConaughey got discovered, why Renée Zellweger’s part is so small, why some of the actresses can’t eat ketchup to this day, and everything else you didn’t know about the making of the classic high school flick Dazed and Confused.
In this extraordinary oral history, Willie Nelson’s friends, kin, and collaborators (Jimmy Carter, Emmylou Harris, Robert Redford, Merle Haggard, and many more big names) tell their favorite stories about the Red Headed Stranger.
By now we've heard plenty about how smart senior presidential adviser Karl Rove is, and how he's the most powerful political consultant of all time, and how he delights Republicans and bedevils Democrats. But how did the man who made George W. Bush famous get to be famousand infamoushimself?
His life was as short and sweet as his songs, but who was the Lubbock rocker whose influence over popular music will not fade away?
The King Ranch saga: how one family conquered, tamed, loved, toiled on, and fought over a great piece of Texas.
On March 18, 1937, the residents of New London, southeast of Tyler, endured the worst small-town tragedy in U.S. history: an explosion at the combined junior-senior high school that killed some three hundred students and teachers.
As he readies himself for this summer's Tour de France, the two-time winner is battling allegations in Europe and elsewhere that he uses performance-enhancing drugs. He insists he is clean. But proving that is turning out to be one of his toughest challenges yet. He doesn't use performance-enhancing drugs, he