Meanwhile, in Texas: Building the World’s Biggest Piñata, One Bag of Corn Nuts at a Time
Plus, a harrowing vehicular encounter with a spear and a harrowing vehicular encounter with a cornfield.
The Texas Rangers are an elite division of the state police with a storied history—some of it flattering, some not, and some just plain false—older than the state itself. The Rangers themselves date their history to Stephen F. Austin’s 1823 call for a small militia to defend his colony against Indians and bandits. The unit was dissolved after the Civil War, but later reconstituted chiefly as an Indian fighting force.
Plus, a harrowing vehicular encounter with a spear and a harrowing vehicular encounter with a cornfield.
Hurtado Barbecue, an Arlington favorite, is now open at Globe Life Field, serving giant beef ribs and birria tacos just in time for opening day.
Texas’s elite police agency has evolved from a frontier organization to one famed for its expert interrogators. But some high-profile cases have tarnished that reputation.
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.
Texas’s elite police force has long played the hero in film and television, although the reality is far more complex.
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.
Coming November 15, a tale of the Texas Rangers . . . and a battle for the soul of Texas.
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.
Jeff Guinn’s ‘War on the Border’ punctures the myth of the Rangers as frontier heroes.
How a Texas Ranger’s personal mythology came to be accepted as popular history.
As monuments to slaveholders, Confederate soldiers, and Texas Rangers disappear across the state, we’re being forced to reconsider what should be honored, what should be commemorated, and what it’s time to let go of.
The removal of the statue is part of a larger reappraisal of the role of the Rangers in Texas history.
Stuck at home? Run out of shows to binge-watch? We have a few suggestions.
‘Cult of Glory' upends decades of mythmaking.
'Porvenir, Texas' explores the search for justice after 15 Mexican-Americans were killed at the hands of the Texas Rangers.
In the early twentieth century, long-simmering tensions in South Texas erupted into a grim and brutal race war.
In her groundbreaking new book, Monica Muñoz Martinez uncovers the legacy of a brutal past.
A California transplant wonders if the Texas Rangers exist only on the small screen.
The embattled agricultural commissioner is being investigated by the Texas Rangers, which may have given casual observers déjà vu.
Making the guns that won the West.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw today proved he can be every bit as political on ethics issues as any Travis County district attorney.
And brush up on Texas history at the same time. “Texas Rising” premieres on Memorial Day.
Already running gunboats on the Rio Grande, the Texas Department of Public Safety has now purchased a manned spy plane to police the border.
Why members of the Huntsville city council sicced the Texas Rangers on a group of lightly-followed Twitter parody accounts.
Walker, Texas Admiral, anyone? DPS will launch six gunboats on the Rio Grande to fight drug trafficking.
The Hutchison campaign is doing a better job of having a daily presence—it couldn’t have done a worse job—but it is still too reminiscent of a high school debate approach. By that I mean the campaign is trying to attack here and probe for a weakness there without developing the
Is nothing sacred? Playing politics with the Texas Rangers ought to be off limits. And if the governor is going to play politics with them, shouldn’t the governor have to say how many Rangers he is deploying? Is it two, or twenty? The El Paso Times published a
Was the quaint East Texas town of Mineola home to a horrific child sex ring? Were the three people sent to prison last year for running it guilty? Was justice served? Depends on which district attorney you ask.
Nearly two centuries after their forebears protected colonists from Indian raids, the Texas Rangers are alive and well and wrestling with the realities of the twenty-first century. In their own words, the iconic crime fighters explain how their world has changed—and what it takes to battle the latest generation of
Greg Ott, the philosophy graduate student who was convicted of killing a Texas Ranger in 1978, has finally been released and is getting on with his life.
What happened to former Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson.
The most famous bank-robbing lovers of all time weren't nearly as glamorous as Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Although the fragile, pretty Bonnie Parker had her good points, Clyde Barrow was a scrawny, two-timing psychopath. They were straight out of a country and western ballad. And when they died in
Twenty-two years ago a Texas Ranger was shot and killed during a drug raid on the home of Greg Ott, a philosophy graduate student. Even today, no one really knows what happened on that tragic night.
After thieves stole his daughter’s horse, deputy U.S. marshal Parnell McNamara didn’t make a federal case out of it. Instead, he rounded up a group of old-style lawmen and lit out after them.
Are the legendary lawmen necessary? Yes, but their inability to grapple with the modern world threatens to make them irrelevant.
The race war on the range.
Bob Doherty was a Texas ranger who believed in the myth of the Old West; Greg Ott was a college dope dealer, a child of the sixties. When they met, it destroyed both their lives.
A history of the Texas Rangers.