Going to Texas: Five Centuries of Texas Maps »

The Center for Texas Studies at TCU is designed to celebrate all that makes Texas distinctive. It is housed in AddRan College of Humanities and Social Sciences, where various disciplines and programs can act in concert to foster and nurture the essence of Texas. History is, of course, central, but Texas literature, anthropology, ethnography, politics, religions, philosophy, and design and textiles all represent elements that are a part of the mosaic of Texas.

This volume illustrates the history of the Lone Star State through color plates of sixty-four historic Texas maps from the Marty and Yana Davis Map Collection, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, and includes ten original essays written by noted historians. Going to Texas is a catalog that will accompany the exhibition of the Davis Map Collection to ten museums throughout the Southwest over a period of two years. It will begin in Dallas at the Hall of State with the Dallas Historical Society and conclude at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth.

The maps range from the earliest sixteenth-century maps of New Spain through early settlement, the Republic and statehood, and into the twenty-first century. These objects are not only historical documents but also served to promote settlement or another aspect of Texas, to chart transport lines, and to guide the military. The earliest maps demonstrate cartography as an art that only centuries later evolved into a science.

The accompanying essays cover the Spanish exploration, the Louisiana Purchase and the Texas borderlands, empresario settlement, the Republic of Texas, the Trans-Pecos, statehood and the Confederacy, the end of the nineteenth century, the Mexican wars, and Texas in the twentieth century. They provide the historical context in which the maps should be viewed.

The maps are presented not only as historical artifacts but also as representations of culture, art, politics, and the great trends of industrialization and westward expansion. They reflect much of the American movement toward Manifest Destiny and the creation of the myths of "The West." The collection serves not only to illustrateTexas history but also American and European cultures over the centuries. Both the map collector and the amateur will benefit from reading this catalog.