Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas

Texas is a big wonderful thing and this is a big wonderful book about this big wonderful thing. Stephen Harrigan attempts to cover it all in a mere 925 pages: the Alamo; Stephen F(uller) Austin; the Battle of San Jacinto; Judge Roy Bean; Bonnie and Clyde; the Branch Dividian compound in Mt. Carmel; Brown & Root; buffalo soldiers; George H. W. and George W. Bush; Cabeza de Vaca; the Caddo Indians; Camino Real; carpetbaggers; cattle drives; Cherokee Indians; Seven Cities of Cibola; the Civil War; Colt revolvers; the Comanches; John Connally; cowboys; Davy Crockett; Crystal City, Texas; Czech and German immigrants; Martin Dies; the Dust Bowl; Dale Evans; Edna Ferber; “Pa” and “Ma” Ferguson; football; Fort Davis; the Galveston hurricane; John Nance Garner; Charles Goodnight; James Hogg; horses; Sam Houston; Humble Oil; Jefferson, Texas; Lyndon Baines Johnson; Janis Joplin; Barbara Jordan; the Karankawas; the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the Kilgore Rangerettes; the King Ranch; the Ku Klux Klan; Jean Lafitte; Tom Landry; lynchings of African-Americans; Mary Kay; mavericks; Larry McMurtry; Mexican-Americans; the moon landing; Nacogdoches, Texas; Jose Antonio Navarro; Madalyn Murray O'Hair; Georgia O'Keeffe; open range; Lee Harvey Oswald; Padre Island; Palo Duro Canyon; Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker; George Parr; the pecan shelling business; the Piney Woods; the prison system; Prohibition; railroads; Reconstruction; the Republic of Texas; Ann Richards; the Rio Grande; Roe v. Wade; the Runaway Scrape; Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna; the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s; Selena; Allan Shivers; slavery; the Southwest Conference; Spanish land grants; Spanish missions; Spindletop; the State Fair of Texas; Tejanos; tenant farmers; “Texas, Our Texas”; the explosion in Texas City, Texas; the Texas Rangers; the University of Texas; Ralph Yarborough; “The Yellow Rose of Texas”; and Lorenzo de Zavala. Whew. All these stories told as if the author were sitting around the campfire, swapping tales. And, even so, the author concludes the book regretting the things he was unable to include.