El Paso’s African American community can trace its origins back to the 16th century, when the black Moor known as Esteban roamed the southwest and, more significantly, those Africans in the party of conquistador Juan de Oñate crossed the Rio Grande in 1598. The modern El Paso African American community began to take shape in the 1880s, as the railroad industry, military establishment, and agricultural community all had black Americans in their ranks. Black leaders and their followers established a school and founded several significant black churches. Texas’s first state branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is recorded to have been formed in El Paso; the first major court cases that challenged the all-white Democratic primary came from this city; the Texas Western College basketball team won the NCAA championship in 1966 with five starting black players; and today, the city is inhabited by black military retirees, entrepreneurs, educators, and other professionals (each with vibrant and socially conscious organizations), making it a progressive model of community development.

El Paso's African American community can trace its origins back to the 16th century, when the black Moor known as Esteban roamed the southwest and, more significantly, those Africans in the party of conquistador Juan de Oñate crossed the Rio Grande in 1598. The modern El Paso African American community began to take shape in the 1880s, as the railroad industry, military establishment, and agricultural community all had black Americans in their ranks. Black leaders and their followers established a school and founded several significant black churches. Texas's first state branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is recorded to have been formed in El Paso; the first major court cases that challenged the all-white Democratic primary came from this city; the Texas Western College basketball team won the NCAA championship in 1966 with five starting black players; and today, the city is inhabited by black military retirees, entrepreneurs, educators, and other professionals (each with vibrant and socially conscious organizations), making it a progressive model of community development.

In 1907, physician Lawrence A. Nixon fled the racial violence of central Texas to settle in the border town of El Paso. There he became a community and civil rights leader. His victories in two Supreme Court decisions paved the way for dismantling all-white political primaries across the South. Will Guzmán delves into Nixon's lifelong struggle against Jim Crow. Linking Nixon's activism to his independence from the white economy, support from the NAACP, and the man's own indefatigable courage, Guzmán also sheds light on Nixon's presence in symbolic and literal borderlands--as an educated professional in a time when few went to college, as an African American who made waves when most feared violent reprisal, and as someone living on the mythical American frontier as well as an international boundary. A powerful addition to the literature on African Americans in the Southwest, Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands explores seldom-studied corners of the Black past and the civil rights movement.

Not one but two civil rights movements flourished in mid-twentieth century Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation with one another. Far from the gaze of the national media, African American and Mexican American activists combated the twin caste systems of Jim Crow and Juan Crow. These insurgents worked chiefly within their own racial groups, yet they also looked to each other for guidance and, at times, came together in solidarity. The movements sought more than integration and access: they demanded power and justice. Civil Rights in Black and Brown draws on more than 500 oral history interviews newly collected across Texas, from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods and everywhere in between. The testimonies speak in detail to the structure of racism in small towns and huge metropolises—both the everyday grind of segregation and the haunting acts of racial violence that upheld Texas’s state-sanctioned systems of white supremacy. Through their memories of resistance and revolution, the activists reveal previously undocumented struggles for equity, as well as the links Black and Chicanx organizers forged in their efforts to achieve self-determination.

Chronicles the experiences of African-American soldiers serving in the United States Army in racially-segregated Texas from 1899 to 1914.

In this wide-ranging study Stephen Foster explores Puritanism in England and America from its roots in the Elizabethan era to the end of the seventeenth century. Focusing on Puritanism as a cultural and political phenomenon as well as a religious movement, Foster addresses parallel developments on both sides of the Atlantic and firmly embeds New England Puritanism within its English context. He provides not only an elaborate critque of current interpretations of Puritan ideology but also an original and insightful portrayal of its dynamism. According to Foster, Puritanism represented a loose and incomplete alliance of progressive Protestants, lay and clerical, aristocratic and humble, who never decided whether they were the vanguard or the remnant. Indeed, in Foster's analysis, changes in New England Puritanism after the first decades of settlement did not indicate secularization and decline but instead were part of a pattern of change, conflict, and accomodation that had begun in England. He views the Puritans' own claims of declension as partisan propositions in an internal controversy as old as the Puritan movement itself. The result of these stresses and adaptations, he argues, was continued vitality in American Puritanism during the second half of the seventeenth century. Foster draws insights from a broad range of souces in England and America, including sermons, diaries, spiritual autobiographies, and colony, town, and court records. Moreover, his presentation of the history of the English and American Puritan movements in tandem brings out the fatal flaws of the former as well as the modest but essential strengths of the latter.

"An emerging field of study that explores the Hispanic minority in the United States, Latino Studies is enriched by an interdisciplinary perspective. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, demographers, linguists, as well as religion, ethnicity, and culture scholars, among others, bring a varied, multifaceted approach to the understanding of a people whose roots are all over the Americas and whose permanent home is north of the Rio Grande. Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies offers an authoritative, trustworthy, and up-to-date intellectual map to this ever-changing discipline."--Editorial page.