Back to the Future
Texas History Movies taught history the old-fashioned way.
Categories: History
By: Mark Boardman 11/01/2007
Texas History Movies—the name is not entirely accurate.
Texas history? Yes. Movies? Nope, they’re comic books. These comics were once a major influence on Lone Star students learning about the state’s past. And they might be once again.
Our story dates back to 1926. E.B. Doran, the director of news and telegraph for The Dallas Morning News, had an idea for a new feature—a cartoon series on state history. The newspaper’s editors hoped it would be “entertaining as well as educational.” They called it Texas History Movies.
The strips looked like other comics of the period. The drawings were, well, cartoonish. Historical characters, like Davy Crockett and Sam Houston, expressed their thoughts in an earthy and surprisingly funny fashion. In one case, the comic told the story of the Father of Texas, Stephen Austin, prior to his arrival in Texas, when he took a job at the Louisiana Advertiser newspaper. The strip showed him busy at a desk, reviewing copy. A young man comes up to him, saying, “Rush this, Steve.” Austin says, “I hate to kill news items for these ads.”
Here and there, panels contained no pictures, just narrative—a direct rip-off from the silent movies of the time (and that’s the source of the name).
The depictions of blacks, Hispanics and Indians were pretty racist, to be honest. Mexicans were often called “greasers,” Indians, “injuns,” and so on and so forth. Texas History Movies were not PC.
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