Texas traces the state's sweeping history from Indigenous worlds and Spanish colonization to slavery, revolution, oil, migration, and modern political power

Texas presents a wide-ranging history of the state through conquest, settlement, slavery, independence, statehood, capitalism, and political reinvention. Benjamin H. Johnson situates Texas within Indigenous homelands, Spanish and Mexican rule, Anglo expansion, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the long afterlives of racial hierarchy. The narrative connects iconic Texas themes such as the Alamo, cattle, oil, and boosterism to labor, migration, violence, and competing visions of identity. Demographic change, urban growth, and partisan transformation shape the modern state alongside persistent myths of exceptionalism. Texas matters as both a regional story and a lens on larger American histories of empire, extraction, inequality, and belonging. The subject is historical rather than psychedelic, and no psychoactive substance appears central to the book's focus.