Randolph B. "Mike" Campbell Series – serie

Ferdinand Lindheimer was already renowned as the father of Texas botany when, in late 1852, he became the founding editor of the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung, a German-language weekly newspaper for the German settler community on the Central Texas frontier. His first year of publication was a pivotal time for the settlers and the American Indians whose territories they occupied. Based on an analysis of the paper’s first year—and drawing on methods from documentary and narrative history, ethnohistory, and literary analysis—Daniel J. Gelo and Christopher J. Wickham deliver a new chronicle of the frontier in 1853. Lindheimer reports in detail on the area’s Indian peoples. Some Lipan Apaches are killed when the army does not learn of their peaceful intentions; restitution is made at Fredericksburg. The Penateka band of Comanches honors the peace agreement they signed with the Germans six years earlier, but their days in the region are numbered.

Often obscured in the history of the nineteenth-century US-Mexico borderlands, European-born entrepreneurs played a definitive role in pushing the Lower Rio Grande borderlands into Atlantic markets. Though they were often stymied by mismanagement, notions of ethnic and cultural superiority, and eruptions of violence, these entrepreneurs persistently attempted to remake the region into a modern commercial utopia.  Globalizing the Lower Rio Grande highlights the actions of folks like English-born John C. Beales, who convinced a party of Europeans to trek to the isolated Las Moras Creek to build a colony from scratch; Alexander Bourgeois d’Orvanne, who manipulated powerful French and German leaders to support a settlement scheme on the Rio Grande; Spanish-born JosÉ San RomÁn and the way he constructed massive transatlantic networks of credit and exchange; and Joseph Kleiber from Strasbourg, who facilitated the construction of a European-owned railroad line along the Rio Grande.