As a young teamster on a pack-mule train, Wilfred Dudley Smithers saw the Rio Grande's Big Bend for the first time in 1916, and it captured his imagination forever. For decades thereafter he returned to Texas's last great frontier -- the great bend of the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border -- chronicling the region and its people in words and photographs. After half a century of photography, Smithers's superlative collection of nine thousand images ended up at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1976 more than one hundred of these were reproduced in Chronicles of the Big Bend, a...

"They came, they saw, they liked it," Stanley Marcus recalls of 1936 - the year "the rest of America discovered Texas." That year, in the midst of the nation's depression, the Lone Star State extravagantly celebrated the centennial of its independence from Mexico with fervor, fanfare, and hoop-la. Spawned by pride, patriotism, and a large measure of economic self-interest, the 1936 centennial observances marked a high tide of ethnocentrism in Texas and etched a new image of the state.
In 1923 the Advertising Clubs of Texas launched the centennial movement to advertise the state...