Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images

Join us as scholar Ron Tyler discusses his latest publication Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images. Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from railroads to telegraphy. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture. One of the great subjects of the lithography boom was an emerging Euro-American colony in the Americas: Texas. Although lithographic establishments thrived in Galveston, Houston, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Dallas in post-Civil War Texas, they were ultimately cut short by the development of halftone engraving and the 1900 Galveston hurricane, still one of the deadliest natural disasters to strike the United States.

In Texas Lithographs, Ron Tyler assembles works from 1818 to 1900, many created by outsiders and newcomers promoting investment and settlement in Texas. Whether they depict the early French colony of Champ d'Asile, the Republic of Texas, and the war with Mexico; or urban growth, frontier exploration, and the key figures of a developing Euro-American empire; the images collected envision an Eden of opportunity—a fairy-tale dream that remains foundational to Texans' sense of self and to the world's sense of Texas.