Light Townsend Cummins

To the Vast and Beautiful Land gathers eleven essays written by Light Townsend Cummins, a foremost authority on Texas and Louisiana during the Spanish colonial era, and traces the arc of the author's career over a quarter of a century. Each essay includes a new introduction linking the original article to current scholarship and forms the connective tissue for the volume. A new bibliography updates and supplements the sources cited in the essays. From the ""enduring community"" of Anglo-American settlers in colonial Natchez to the Gálvez family along the Gulf Coast and their participation in the American Revolution, Cummins shows that mercantile commerce and land acquisition went hand-in-hand as dual motivations for the migration of English-speakers into Louisiana and Texas. Mercantile trade dominated by Anglo-Americans increasingly tied the Mississippi valley and western Gulf Coast to the English-speaking ports of the Atlantic world bridging two centuries, shifting it away from earlier French and Spanish commercial patterns. As a result, Anglo-Americans moved to the region as residents and secured land from Spanish authorities, who often welcomed them with favorable settlement policies. This steady flow of settlement set the stage for families such as the Austins—first Moses and later his son Stephen—to take root and further ""Anglocize"" a colonial region. Taken together, To the Vast and Beautiful Land makes a new contribution to the growing literature on the history of the Spanish borderlands in North America.

At Fair Park in Dallas, a sculpture of a Native American figure, bronze with gilded gold leaf, strains a bow before sending an arrow into flight. Tejas Warrior has welcomed thousands of visitors since the Texas Centennial Exposition opened in the 1930s. The iconic piece is instantly recognizable, yet few people know about its creator: Allie Victoria Tennant, one of a notable group of Texas artists who actively advanced regionalist art in the decades before World War II.Light Townsend Cummins follows Tennant’s public career from the 1920s to the 1960s, both as an artist and as a culture-bearer, as she advanced cultural endeavors, including the arts. A true pathfinder, she helped to create and nurture art institutions that still exist today, most especially the Dallas Museum of Art, on whose board of trustees she sat for almost thirty years. Tennant also worked on behalf of other civic institutions, including the public schools, art academies, and the State Fair of Texas, where she helped create the Women’s Building. Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas sheds new light on an often overlooked artist.

On History’s Trail: Speeches and Essays of the Texas State Historian, 2009–2012 contains twenty-nine speeches and essays from Light Townsend Cummins’s time as the State Historian of Texas, when he spoke to dozens of groups across the Lone Star State and beyond.The subjects include the settlement of Canary Islanders in Texas and Louisiana, the Red River War, Dallas sculptress Allie V. Tennant, the ""hometown"" of Audie Murphy, and much more. While wide-ranging in time and place, this collection emphasizes the importance of biography and the individual in Texas history, never losing the warmth and humanity that is Cummins’s hallmark.The most important point of On History’s Trail, though, is the most valuable lesson Cummins learned while State Historian: The history of Texas is alive and well today. There are more people reading and researching the history of the state than ever before. The range of topics in this volume shows the viability, breadth, and range of the state’s remarkable history.

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