By the late 1810s, a global revolution in cotton had remade the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing wealth and waves of Americans to the Gulf Coast while also devastating the lives and villages of Mexicans in Texas. In response, Mexico threw open its northern territories to American farmers in hopes that cotton could bring prosperity to the region. Thousands of Anglo-Americans poured into Texas, but their insistence that slavery accompany them sparked pitched battles across Mexico. An extraordinary alliance of Anglos and Mexicans in Texas came together to defend slavery against abolitionists in the Mexican government, beginning a series of fights that culminated in the Texas Revolution. In the aftermath, Anglo-Americans rebuilt the Texas borderlands into the most unlikely creation: the first fully committed slaveholders' republic in North America. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States, and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s.

Originally published: Kent, Ohio: Kent State Press, c1996. With new pref.

"In addition to identifying design sources actually used in Texas, Culbertson provides personal background information on several of the original owners, many of whom were prosperous and respected members of their communities. By providing such contextual information about the houses and their owners, Culbertson shows that using designs published in magazines and catalogues was socially and culturally acceptable during this period." "The book closes with an in-depth look at the use of published designs in one particular community, Waxahachie, and the place of these houses within the community and in the lives of their original owners."--BOOK JACKET.

This book explores how the diverse and fiercely independent peoples of Texas and New Mexico came to think of themselves as members of one particular national community or another in the years leading up to the Mexican-American War. Hispanics, Native Americans, and Anglo Americans made agonizing and crucial identity decisions against the backdrop of two structural transformations taking place in the region during the first half of the 19th century and often pulling in opposite directions.

Historians have published countless studies of the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 and the era of Reconstruction that followed those four years of brutally destructive conflict. Most of these works focus on events and developments at the national or state level, explaining and analyzing the causes of disunion, the course of the war, and the bitter disputes that arose during restoration of the Union. Much less attention has been given to studying how ordinary people experienced the years from 1861 to 1876. What did secession, civil war, emancipation, victory for the United States, and Reconstruction mean at the local level in Texas? Exactly how much change—economic, social, and political—did the era bring to the focus of the study, Harrison County: a cotton-growing, planter-dominated community with the largest slave population of any county in the state? Providing an answer to that question is the basic purpose of A Southern Community in Crisis: Harrison County, Texas, 1850–1880. First published by the Texas State Historical Association in 1983, the book is now available in paperback, with a foreword by Andrew J. Torget, one of the Lone Star State’s top young historians.