, Gordon-Reed debunked conventional historical narratives, revealing complex, instructive truths about the relationship. Now, in, a collection of essays about Texas, Gordon-Reed’s family and the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas learned of their emancipation, the historian whose Texas family tree extends on her mother’s side to the 1820s and on her father’s side at least to the 1860s, speaks truth to Texas lore with incisive clarity.
Born in Livingston and raised in nearby Conroe, Gordon-Reed says Texas is a special place filled with larger-than-life legends and outsized stories of cowboys, ranchers and oilmen that perpetuate inspiring, if not always accurate, themes of Texas’ exceptionalism.slave plantations, cotton fields and Jim Crow
, which are as significant to Texas’ origin story as ranching and oil, she contends. It is uncomfortable for many to confront, but it is a sign of maturity when these truths, some of which touch the legends of heroes of the Alamo, are laid bare, she argues. “The choice of slavery was deliberate, and that reality is hard to square with a desire to present a pristine and heroic origin story about the settlement of Texas,” writes Gordon-Reed. As a consequence, she contends, slavery is often dismissed as an unfortunate event with “no sense of the institution’s centrality” in Texas.“supposedly closed the door on [slavery]... it opened another tragic phase in the state and country’s history.
Such complexity is the takeaway from Juneteenth, the book and now national holiday. History is neither just the past nor an unambiguous forecast of the future. It is a narrative told frequently from perspectives that resist painful truths and complicated elaborations. And from that narrative arise traditions, relationships and viewpoints that minimize imperfections and anything that falls outside conventional understanding.
Careful! Governor Abbott will arrest her for “spreading CRT”! All the while praising the Klan!
She is nutty