Texas history is often recounted through tales of revolution, oil booms, and cattle drives. But what if we considered a different lens--one shaped by wind and wildfire, rivers and drought, grasslands and pine forests? Nature and Place in Texas reimagines the Lone Star story by centering its ecosystems. This collection of essays by leading environmental historians reveals how the state's natural features--its plains, deserts, rivers, forests, and coastlines--have shaped and been shaped by human endeavor. From the long shadow of plantation agriculture along Texas rivers to the contested engineering of the Rio Grande, and from the lost pines of East Texas to the windblown plains of the Panhandle, these essays chart a dynamic, place-based history. Organized by ecological regions and themes--such as water, labor, urban development, and recreation--this volume offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the environmental dimensions of Texas history. Contributors draw from interdisciplinary methods and speak to ongoing concerns like climate change, land use, and environmental justice. Ideal for classroom use, the book foregrounds how Texas's environment is not merely a backdrop to history but a central force in its making. With its regional breadth and scholarly depth, Nature and Place in Texas invites students to see the Lone Star State in a new light--as a place where history and ecology are inseparable.
Kenna Lang Archer is an Associate Professor of History in the Dr. Arnoldo De León Department of History at Angelo State University. She teaches U.S. Environmental History, Colonial and Revolutionary American History, and American History surveys. Her first book, Unruly Waters: A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River, was published in 2015. In 2018, she co-authored a third edition of Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land with Drs. John Opie and Char Miller.
C. J. Alvarez is the author of Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.-Mexico Divide. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Andrew C. Baker is an Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Commerce. He is the author of Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South (2018) and has published award-winning articles in Environmental History, Agricultural History, and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He is currently working on an agricultural and environmental history of arsenic.
Neel Baumgardner received a Ph.D. in environmental history from the University of Texas at Austin and teaches in the Department of History at UT-San Antonio. His research focuses on public and private conservation, including the creation of international parks along the shared borders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Neel contributed to "The National Parks of Texas: In Contact With Beauty," a Texas Public Broadcasting Association documentary highlighting the 16 national parks in Texas for the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Texas Land Conservancy, a land trust that protects 150,000 acres of lands and watersheds across the state.
Tim Bowman is Professor and head of the Department of History at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas. He is the author of two books: Blood Oranges: Agriculture and Colonialism in the South Texas Borderlands (Texas A&M University Press, 2016) and You Will Never be One of Us: A Teacher, a Court Case, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservatism (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022). His research interests include borderlands history, immigration, civil rights, and modern Texas politics.
Claire Williams Bridgwater is currently a research professor at American University in environmental sciences and also a senior scientific analyst for DARPA-BTO in the Department of Defense. She holds a doctorate in forestry with a minor in genetics from North Carolina State University. In 2021, she made a career transition to science diplomacy after completing an M.A in Global Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. Before that she had been a tenured full professor at Texas A&M Faculty of Genetics and a visiting professor at several other universities. Claire has been a science advisor in energy and environment for the U.S. Dept of State's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. In 2019, she was awarded a Fulbright to Russia's Sukachev Institute of Forestry and the tall-tower observatory ZOTTO in Krasnoyarsk Krai in central Siberia to work in atmospheric biology research.
Samuel Brunk is a Professor of History at the University of Texas-El Paso. His publications include Emiliano Zapata!: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 1995) and The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata: Myth, Memory, and Mexico's Twentieth Century (University of Texas Press, 2008). His current book project, tentatively entitled Conquering Cacti: War, Boundary Marking, and Botany in the Deserts of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, uses the "discovery" and naming of cacti to explore the meeting of Mexico and the United States in the deserts of the borderlands--with a focus on the Chihuahuan desert--and their efforts to occupy, control, and understand that terrain.
Julie Courtwright is an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University, where she studies U.S. Environment and the American West. Her most recent publications include Prairie Fire: A Great Plains History (University Press of Kansas, 2011) and Blows Like Hell: The Windy Plains of the West in Frehner and Brosnan, eds., The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region's Environmental Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Her current book project, Windswept: A Great Plains History, under contract with the University Press of Kansas, is the second in a planned trilogy about the history of fire, wind, and water on the Great Plains.
Brian Frehner is Chair and Professor of history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where he teaches and researches on the topics of oil, environment, technology and the American West. He is currently at work on a monograph examining the transition from coal to oil in the first half of the twentieth century. He is the author of Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920 (2011) and co-editor of two volumes: Indians and Energy: Exploitation and Opportunity in the American Southwest (2010) and The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region's Environmental Histories (2021).
Arthur R. Gómez (1947-2021) was a historian for the National Park Service and author of Quest for the Golden Circle: The Four Corners and the Metropolitan West, 1945-1970 and co-author of New Mexico: A History. His unpublished study of the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park is a partial basis for this chapter.
Alana de Hinojosa is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University. She holds a PhD in Chicana/o Studies from UCLA and certificates in American Indian Studies (UCLA) and Digital Public Humanities (George Mason University). Prior to joining TXST, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University and a Digital Public Humanities Fellow at the ASU Hispanic Research Center. Alana's research is concerned with histories of displacement, diaspora, and refusal, and what these have to do with the Río Grande. Her current book project focuses on the Chamizal Land Dispute between the United States and Mexico and the ongoing aftermath of the landmark Chamizal Treaty of 1964.
Alex Hunt, Professor of English, has taught at West Texas A&M University since 2002. He received his BA and MA from Colorado State University and his PhD from the University of Oregon. Dr. Hunt has published books on novelist Annie Proulx, postcolonial ecocriticism, and 19th century British investment in the American West. He has published articles on Texas Panhandle and ranching history, various works of Western and Southwestern literature, Native American and Chicano/a studies, ecocriticism and climate fiction. Hunt served as editor of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Review from 2012 to 2017 and the Vincent/Haley Professor of Western Studies since 2012. He was a Fulbright Specialist to Graz, Austria in 2017 and has also lectured in England and France. He was awarded the status of Regents Professor by the Texas A&M University System in 2020. He founded the Center for the Study of the American West (CSAW) at West Texas A&M University in 2016 and has since served as its director.
Todd Kerstetter lives on high ground near the Trinity River in Fort Worth and is a Professor of history at TCU. He teaches classes on environmental history and the American West. He has published books and articles in both fields, including Flood on the Tracks: Living, Dying, and the Nature of Disaster in the Elkhorn River Basin (Texas Tech University Press, 2018). He is currently working on a book about Fort Worth's relationship with water.
Scot McFarlane is a river historian who has taught history at the collegiate and high school level. He earned a PhD in American history from Columbia University and a BA from Bowdoin College, where he is currently a research affiliate in environmental studies. As a river historian, Scot collaborates with teachers to incorporate environmental history into K–12 social studies courses. He has developed a widely used website on the history of rivers and published several articles on our relationship to waterways. He is currently writing a book on Texas' Trinity River. Scot was part of the team that wrote the American Historical Association's American Lesson Plan, he also served as a research scholar for Historic New England, and founded the Oxbow History Company.
