Dr. Ben Johnson Publishes Texas: An American History
Professor Benjamin Johnson’s most recent book, , was published this February by Yale University Press. The book is a multifaceted and inclusive survey of Texas history, delving into the complexities of his home state’s past and identity, pushing past stereotypes to offer a balanced portrait of the Lone Star State.
Dr. Johnson will be delivering a book talk on Wednesday, April 16, from 12:30 to 2:00 in the Simpson Hall Multi-Purpose Room.
Below, Dr. Johnson answers questions about his book and the influence of Texas history.
What inspired this book?
For years I’ve been struck by the disjuncture between the enormous contemporary political, social, and economic influence of Texas, on the one hand, and the insular and exceptionalist way in which Texas historians often approach their work, on the other. So the chance to write a book of big scope that would place Texas in the context of wider developments in Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. history, was appealing. An editor I had worked with for years at Yale University Press pitched the idea of a book of lots of short, narrative-driven chapters, nicely illustrated. I took the bait.
You grew up in Texas. How did your personal connection to the state shape your work?
The places we grow up exercise an enormous influence on us, I believe. I remain profoundly attached to Texas and write from a place of love and closeness, rather than criticism and distance. I’ve visited or lived in many of the places that I write about, which helped me offer vivid descriptions of them. I think that being an insider also helps me see some complexities that others might miss, particularly with respect to groups like white Evangelicals who it is easy to treat as a monolith.
There are currently battles being waged in Texas over the state's history--how it is told and whose stories should be told. How does this book fit into current controversies surrounding Texas history?
Yes, the history wars have reached a fevered pitch in Texas and the country as a whole. There was recently a kind of civil war within the Texas State Historical Association, the major organization fostering the study of Texas history that was founded in the 1890s, with a conservative faction using a lawsuit to essentially seize control of it in the name of combatting “woke” history. Most active scholars and public historians of Texas history formed a new organization, the Alliance for Texas history, as a result. At about the same time, the state legislature in 2021 enacted a law that limits how public school teachers present U.S. and Texas history, and created something called the 1836 Project, designed to “promote patriotic education and increase awareness of the Texas values that continue to stimulate boundless prosperity across this state.” Sharp restrictions on the teaching of history at the university level are now before the legislature.
When it comes to these debates, I want to have my cake and eat it too, by which I mean I both want the book to be read as an intervention into ongoing debates, but also to start some new conversations. I have no patience for the triumphalist, feel-good histories that all tyrants want told about their countries, and thus I don’t shy away from the horrors of slavery, conquest, mob violence and the like. These are the subjects that lie at the heart of the current culture wars. But I do try to make those passages as specific and concrete as possible, avoiding making statements like “Texas was a white supremacist society” until the reader has read about a slave auction or lynching or account of emancipation. And it is just as important for me to try to add new subjects and events to the Texas canon, such as the emergence of distinctive Indigenous societies, their recent revitalization, U.S. liberalism, LGBTQ rights, and modern business practices. If people could stop fighting about history so much, they might realize that there is a lot for all of us to learn.
How does the Texas story expand our understandings of American history?
I try to nestle my account of Texas in the larger contours of Indigenous, Mexican, and US history throughout the book. One way is looking at reciprocal influences between Texas and the outside world – from the arrival of corn agriculture; the impact of revolutions for self-determination in Europe and Latin America; the consequences of the admission of Texas to the Union (which arguably puts the US on the road to civil war); or how the business models of companies like the Dallas Cowboys or Compaq computers or Whole Foods changed the business world at large. A second way is the thread of historical memory – Texas has given the US as a whole some of its classic historical stories, like that of the Alamo.