Texas Traditions: The Culture of the Lone Star State - Softcover

Turner, Robyn

4.2

5 ratings by Goodreads

9780316856393: Texas Traditions: The Culture of the Lone Star State

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316856398 ISBN 13: 9780316856393

Publisher: Sierra Club Books, 1996

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Discusses the history, geography, industry, and arts of Texas

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From School Library Journal:

Grade 5-8. Texas is a big, big state. So any overview less comprehensive than The New Handbook of Texas (6 vols., 7000 pages) inevitably sports a shotgun approach to addressing the sprawling potpourri of the people and places in the Lone Star State. Still, native Texan Turner has done a respectable, if a tad feminist and mutliculturally biased job of presenting Texas to a young audience no doubt aware of the physical enormity of the state but clueless to its multicultural legacy. Almost every page has boxes or sidebars with tidbits of trivia that supplement the narratives on the ethnic, geographical, historical, artistic, and ceremonial diversity of a state that has flown (at least) six flags over the past five centuries. Turner, a professed "yellow-dog" Democrat, provides historical emphases that add their own curious color to this book as, for example, a one-page summary of "Servants of the State" features photographs of two women and one man. Heavily illustrated with current and archival photographs, newspaper clippings, broadsides, etc., and an eclectic selection of paintings, Texas Traditions would be a useful supplement to the drier, didactic textbooks Texas schoolchildren must embrace. Young residents of the other 49 states probably won't mind the colorful and cursory approach the author takes to making this state's history palatable if somewhat overwhelming.?John Sigwald, Unger Memorial Library, Plainview, TX
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In a work subtitled ``The Culture of the Lone Star State,'' Turner (Faith Ringgold, 1993, etc.) makes clear that Texas is really the product of many cultures and looks at the contributions of Native Americans, Mexicans, Europeans, Anglo-Americans, African- Americans, and Asian-Americans as ``threads of a finely woven blanket'' that add ``beauty and interest to the whole.'' Turner succinctly limns each group's history, noting, for example, that by the time Europeans landed on Texas's shore in 1528, 12 Native American groups were already well established. She is not as generous, however, in tracing the long history of Mexico and Texas, stating simply that before Texas became a republic and a state, ``it was a part of Mexico.'' She later focuses on Texas's fight for independence from Mexico through the battles of the Alamo and at San Jacinto, and the ultimate triumph of the ``ideas, beliefs, and values of the Texas culture.'' There is no mention of the current cultural climate that sets her perspective against one that suggests the state's revolutionary leaders were land-grabbers. Children will be more interested in the full-color photographs and illustrations that make chapters on art, celebrations, and education visually exciting. They'll find this book useful for reports. (maps, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 9+) -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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