This article is part of Texas Monthly’s special fiftieth-anniversary issue. Read about the other icons that have defined Texas since 1973.
Academic historians weren’t much impressed with T. R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans when it appeared in 1968. One reviewer criticized Fehrenbach’s decision (in his own words) to eschew “irritating footnotes” that would interrupt the book’s narrative flow. Anotherscholar dismissed the author—who, after graduating from Princet...