Modern Times Lecture Series
Texas: An American History
Benjamin Herber Johnson, Ph.D.
SUnday, April 13, 2025 | 2:30pm - 4:00pm
**Doors at 2:00pm; Lecture at 2:30PM
In Person and online!
Tickets
$10 General Admission | $5 Student | $0 NCHM Member
When Americans turn on their laptops, play video games, go to church, vote, eat TexMex, shop for groceries, listen to music, grill steaks, or watch football, they are, knowingly or not, paying tribute to Texas. Tracing the profound and surprising story of the Lone Star State, Benjamin Heber Johnson shines new light on why Texas has had such a powerful influence on U.S. history.
Texas is known to outsiders for mob violence, swaggering self-conception, and conservative politics, but Johnson reveals that the state has also been on the forefront of taming frontier violence, establishing LGBTQ rights, and developing modern businesses such as organic food and personal computing. Neither looking away from the dark chapters of Texas history nor letting them overshadow the achievements of democracy and pluralism that are some of the state’s greatest legacies, Johnson offers a balanced and inclusive history of an often contentious and stereotyped region, covering such topics as the persistence of Native Americans, the frontier story of the Alamo, agrarian populism, racial segregation, the state’s porous border with Mexico, and the way historical memory continues to shape the state’s identity. The reality of Texas, Johnson shows us, is even bigger than we think it is.
To attend online, register and receive the Zoom meeting link by email ahead of the lecture.
About the Speaker
Benjamin Johnson, Ph.D.
Benjamin H. Johnson is a Professor in History at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Johnson's primary areas of research and teaching include environmental history, North American borders, and Latino history. He has taught courses on North American and world environmental history, natural disasters, immigration and ethnicity in the United States, and border and transnational history more generally.
His first book, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (Yale University Press, 2003) offered a new interpretation of the origins of the Mexican-American civil rights movement. He continued his interest in Mexican American history in Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place (Yale University Press, 2008), a collaboration with photographer Jeffrey Gusky, and in journal articles about the ties between Mexican-American politics and postrevolutionary Mexico. Johnson’s other primary interest is in the social and political history of American environmentalism, the subject of his current book Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation (Yale University Press, 2017).
Sponsors
Become a sponsor for this event? Contact Cristina Feldott at (512) 478-2335 or cfeldott@nchmuseum.org.