The popular historical narrative of Texas that J.P. Bryan and his compatriots seek to revive was created after the American Civil War in a process that paralleled the birth of that war’s “Lost Cause” mythology. In 1888 Anna Pennybacker published A New History of Texas for Schools, which became the standard textbook for decades. Her scholarship placed outsized importance on the Texas Revolution—in particular the Alamo—and on glorifying the Texas Rangers. Of the defense of the Alamo, Pennybacker wrote that the “Texans stood” on the walls “like gods.”… With slavery and the Black experience in general erased, Mexicans demonized, and enslavers and Texas Rangers glorified, this textbook set the tone for the mythologizing of Texas history. Historian Gregg Cantrell in his article “The Bones of Stephen F. Austin: History and Memory in Progressive Era Texas” uses Austin’s 1910 reinterment in the Texas State Cemetery as a way to explain the creation of the popular historical memory of Texas. Cantrell asserts, correctly, that in the early 20th century, “Texans began distancing themselves from the memories of the Civil War era—memories associated with slavery, defeat, military occupation and poverty. … The result was a new public view of Texas history that emphasized Texas as both a Western and quintessentially American state whose identity sprang from the hardy pioneers who tamed the wilderness and defeated the Mexicans in the Texas Revolution.” He concludes: “While this may have been a very ‘usable’ past, at least for Progressive Anglo male elites, the triumphalism of the heroic Revolutionary past also left Texans with a highly sanitized collective memory in which Texas’s Hispanic past was largely forgotten and the state’s subsequent stake in slavery, secession, and racial injustice was glossed over.”
These views of Texas history held on throughout the vast majority of the 20th century, and only in the 1970s and 1980s did professional historians begin to challenge this collective memory. Texas historians began bringing narratives of forgotten and neglected groups to light, narratives that, over the last 30 years, the Texas State Historical Association, through the Handbook of Texas and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, has continued to expand on. Still, many Texans continue to suffer under narratives constructed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not until 2012, barely a decade ago, did any minority group have a monument, the Tejano Monument, dedicated to them on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol, and not until 1980 did the State of Texas recognize the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery in Texas on Juneteenth as a state (and as of 2021), a national holiday.