How do you write the history of Texas? The American writer John Steinbeck famously argued that Texas is more than a state, and more even than a state of mind: “It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox.” The history of the Lone Star State is distorted by myth and haunted by memory. It is, moreover, in our own time, increasingly the cudgel of a particular kind of contemporary partisan politics. But even beyond the mythmaking and the cynical politics that exploit it, Texas is the site of contradiction. It is both stunningly cosmopolitan and stubbornly parochial. It contains great wealth and is marked by great poverty. It witnesses explosive growth and forward-looking development and yet remains intractably conventional and backward-looking.

Its history is no less cacophonous than its present. A wary Mexican government sent General Manuel Mier y Terán to report on life in Texas on the eve of its Revolution. He described the land as “a mixture of strange and incoherent parts.” Still, something specific sounds across the pages of its history. Elsewhere we and fellow historians have written of a distinct “American yawp,” an untrammeled barbaric cry that sounds across the pages of a broader U.S. history. “Aquí también,” Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges wrote in a short paen to the state, “el pájaro secreto que sobre los fragores de la historia canta para una tarde y su memoria” (Here, too, the secret bird that ever yet over the clamourings of history sings for an evening and its memory).

In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” an essay from her landmark 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa explored the many tongues she spoke, the many borders her life crossed, and the many efforts to constrain and constrict and suppress those distinct tongues. “Wild tongues can’t be tamed,” she wrote, “they can only be cut out.” Anzaldúa wrote of a particular Chicana borderlands experience, but she captured, in some ways, a core theme of a properly told Texas history: the unceasing collision of cultures and peoples amid the creeping amorphous movement of borders and boundaries over and across communities. That story demands to be told openly, honestly, and rigorously. Without shying from the subjects of Texas’s mythologies, this text aims to capture a history that reflects the state of the field and its many innovations, including a vast array of new work in Indigenous histories, the history of gender and sexuality, the field of slavery studies, environmental history, carceral studies, cultural history, borderlands and Latinx history, and more. Texas Tongues is our attempt to tell that history.

American historians have done this before. In 2014, with the cooperative labor of over 300 academic historians, we launched The American Yawp, a massively collaborative open access U.S. history textbook. We believe that model can be used to tell the history of Texas. It can also annihilate textbook costs and ensure that money is no barrier to understanding this history. But our goal is not simply to make a free history of Texas, it is to build a better one. Rather than a top-down narrative of Texas history written by a senior historian drawing from a long career of scholarship, this project is designed instead as a bottom-up collaboration of practicing Texas historians. This book is an attempt by historians to work together in telling the story of Texas in such a way that is understandable and engaging but also upholds the highest standards of the discipline of history.

We are enlisting the participation of all academic historians who study Texas. This book will draw from over 100 professional historians who contribute reflections on their areas of expertise and chapter editors who weave those contributions into fifteen coherent chapters. The volume will also be supplemented by a primary source reader with selections from a set of diverse, relevant, and open-source or public domain primary sources. We will strive to make a coherent and clear history that reflects the work of serious scholars who devote their lives to understanding the past. We are professional historians, but this is more than simply our job. With Texas history under siege, we feel called to produce an honest accounting of who we are and how we got here. And we hope that will enable a new generation of students to make a better Texas.

If you are interested in working with us or supporting our work, please reach out to the editors, Joseph Locke (josephllocke@gmail.com) and Ben Wright (bgw@utdallas.edu).