The Hidden History of Texas

Imagine somebody knocks on your door. They've got an interesting proposition. Pack up your family. Sell what you can't carry. Leave your home. Travel hundreds of miles into a country you've probably never seen. The roads aren't really roads. There aren't many towns. There are no hospitals. No grocery stores. No police department. And once you arrive, you're pretty much on your own. But... There's...

Hello, and welcome to Political Realignment. I'm Hank Wilson. In our last episode, we stood with America at the end of the Civil War and asked a deceptively simple question: How do you rebuild a nation after it has been divided against itself? But there was another question—one that was perhaps even more difficult. Nearly four million people who had once been enslaved were now free. But what did f...

There are rivers that divide a landscape. And there are rivers that divide the imagination. In Texas, the Pecos managed to do both. For generations, the words West of the Pecos meant something. They meant you were leaving one world and entering another. A harder world. A drier world. A place where towns were separated by miles and miles of country that seemed determined to remind human beings that...

La Junta de los Ríos, Before There Was a Border (Partial Transcript....) If you stand near Presidio, Texas, and look across the Rio Grande toward Ojinaga, Mexico, you're looking at a border. At least that's what the maps tell us. There is Texas on one side, Chihuahua on the other. The United States here. Mexico there. But if you could stand in that same place five hundred years ago, none of those...

A Nation Rebuilt The war ended, but the constitutional questions had just begun. Hello, and welcome to Political Realignment. I'm Hank Wilson. I'd like to begin with a simple question. How do you rebuild a nation after it has been divided against itself? It's a question every generation hopes it will never have to answer. Yet in the spring of 1865, Americans found themselves facing exactly that ch...

Hello friends, and welcome back to Hidden History of Texas. Last time, we visited Alpine, a mountain community that showed us how people learned not simply to travel through West Texas, but to build permanent lives there. Today, we're visiting two communities whose very names remind us of their beginnings. Fort Davis. Fort Stockton. When we hear those names, it's natural to think about soldiers, c...

Episode 95 – Alpine: Where the Mountains Became Home Alpine is often described as the gateway to Big Bend, but its story is far richer than that. In this episode of Hidden History of Texas, we explore a different question: Why did Alpine succeed where so many frontier settlements disappeared? Rather than focusing on dates and famous names, we trace the forces that shaped this remarkable mountain c...

Officers' row (ruins), looking west, before the National Park Service acquired Fort Davis National Historic Site. The Frontier Forts: Guarding West Texas Hello friends, and welcome back to Hidden History of Texas. Last time, we crossed the Pecos River and entered one of the most remarkable landscapes in our state, the Trans-Pecos. We discovered a Texas of mountains instead of rolling hills... dese...

Brown v. Board: The Cornerstone of Change When we began this series, we started with the election of 1964. From there, we journeyed through 1968... 1972... 1976... and finally 1980. Each episode explored another chapter in America's political realignment. At first, those elections appeared to be separate stories. Different candidates. Different issues. Different moments in history. But as we follo...

Welcome to another episode of The Political Realignment a Hidden History of Texas series How does a nation recover its confidence? That question hung over America in 1980. The Vietnam War was over. Watergate had moved from breaking news into history. The Bicentennial optimism of 1976 had faded. Inflation remained painfully high. Interest rates climbed. Gas lines and energy worries had shaken the c...

Hello friends, and welcome back to Hidden History of Texas. This is episode 93 The Trans-Pecos: Texas Beyond the Mountains (NOTE: This is not a verbatim transcript) Last time, we visited El Paso, a city whose story began centuries before there was a Republic of Texas. It reminded us that Texas has never been just one history or one culture. Today, I'd like to take you somewhere that many Texans ha...

1976: After Watergate America celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976. The Bicentennial brought parades, fireworks, tall ships, patriotic ceremonies, and a renewed appreciation for the nation's remarkable history. Yet beneath the celebration lingered a different mood. Only two years earlier, Richard Nixon had become the first American president to resign from office. The Vietnam War had finally ende...

Hello friends, and welcome back to Hidden History of Texas. This is episode 92 – this is the first in a series I’m calling The Rio Grande Frontier – Welcome to El Paso: The Pass of the North When most people think about Texas history, their minds usually start in the  east. They think of Nacogdoches, San Antonio, Austin's Colony, the Alamo, cattle drives, oil fields, and railroads. But today, I wa...

History often remembers elections by who won and who lost. But some elections matter because they reveal deeper changes taking place beneath the surface. The election of 1972 was one of those moments. Many of us consider it to be the landslide that changed America. Those of us who witnessed that time period remember that only four years earlier, America had experienced one of the most turbulent pe...

The Germans, Czechs, and the Making of Texas I live in Central Texas in an area called the Hill Country. We have an old saying that if you drive far enough through the Hill Country, you’ll eventually find three things:a church steeple,a dance hall,and the smell of barbecue smoke drifting across the fields. But behind those familiar, almost stereotypical, Texas scenes lies a deeper story. A story c...

Welcome to 1968: The Year America Came Apart. This is an episode of "The Realignment" a Hidden History Series. There are years in history that feel less like ordinary time and more like a fault line. Years where the ground beneath a nation begins to shift and the people can feel it, they may not understand what they’re feeling, but they know something is changing.. For America, 1968 was one of tho...

OPENING My learning curve about segregation did not happen all at once. I grew up in a Navy family and attended Catholic schools. We moved often. Different states. Different bases. Different communities. But strangely… many things stayed the same. Most of the schools I attended as a child were almost entirely white. In Virginia, in 1962, I remember having my first non-white classmate… a Hispanic g...

1964: The Breaking Point...How a Texas President Helped Reshape American Politics Forever There are years in American history that feel less like moments… and more like fault lines. 1964 was one of them. It was the year the old political order began to crack. Not overnight. Not all at once. But in ways we are still living with today. And at the center of it all stood a Texan. Lyndon B. Johnson Gro...

Welcome to Episode 89 of The Hidden History of Texas. After Sundown: The Hidden Geography of Fear in Texas Tonight, we’re stepping onto a highway most history books barely mention. A road traveled in silence…A road traveled with caution…And sometimes, a road traveled in fear. This episode is called: “After Sundown: The Hidden Geography of Fear in Texas.” We’re going to talk about Sundown Towns…The...