This research guide will provide resources that students can use to complete assignments in HIST 3303: History of San Antonio. Click on the tabs for resources on locating articles, books, primary sources, citing help, and other information! Please don't hesitate to reach out to me or the library if you need research assistance!
You can search the library's catalog to find both books and articles. Please be aware that it sometimes appears that we own a copy of book, but it is the book review. If we own the title, "Texas A&M University-San Antonio Library" will appear on the last line of the citation. The library's catalog also gathers titles that appear within San Antonio area libraries and throughout the world. These books will either have "At San Antonio Libraries" or "At other libraries worldwide" on the last line. Any book that is tagged "At San Antonio Libraries" can be checked out by using a TexShare card. For any book that is tagged "At other libraries worldwide" an Interlibrary Loan request can be made to get that book to the patron.
San Antonio by
This is the first general history of San Antonio, Texas, the seventh largest city in the nation. Its past is complex and ranges across 300 years, from the community's origins as a tiny Spanish frontier town to its contemporary status as a vital American mega-city. Site of some of the most violent struggles between warring empires and people--historians believe San Antonio may be the most fought-over city in U.S. history--it is perhaps most celebrated for the iconic 1836 Battle of the Alamo. The city is also home to four beautifully restored Spanish missions, which in 2015 UNESCO designated a World Heritage Site and have become integral to San Antonio's robust tourist economy along with the fabled River Walk. This study weaves together a series of environmental, social, political, and cultural pressures that have shaped life in the Alamo City over the last three centuries. Residents have long fought to protect and utilize water and other resources even as they have struggled to achieve equal rights and build a more open and democratic society. Activists from all sectors of this multicultural city have believed deeply in its promise even though they have had to push hard to secure and expand its potential. Their efforts were every bit as intense in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as they have been in the twenty-first. Written for a general audience, but with a scholarly attention to detail and nuance, San Antonio: A Tricentennial History immerses readers in the city's fascinating and fraught past.
When Mexicans Could Play Ball by
Winner, Al Lowman Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association, 2014 In 1939, a team of short, scrappy kids from a vocational school established specifically for Mexican Americans became the high school basketball champions of San Antonio, Texas. Their win, and the ensuing riot it caused, took place against a backdrop of shifting and conflicted attitudes toward Mexican Americans and American nationalism in the WWII era. "Only when the Mexicans went from perennial runners-up to champs," García writes, "did the emotions boil over." The first sports book to look at Mexican American basketball specifically, When Mexicans Could Play Ball is also a revealing study of racism and cultural identity formation in Texas. Using personal interviews, newspaper articles, and game statistics to create a compelling narrative, as well as drawing on his experience as a sports writer, García takes us into the world of San Antonio's Sidney Lanier High School basketball team, the Voks, which became a two-time state championship team under head coach William Carson "Nemo" Herrera. An alumnus of the school himself, García investigates the school administrators' project to Americanize the students, Herrera's skillful coaching, and the team's rise to victory despite discrimination and violence from other teams and the world outside of the school. Ultimately, García argues, through their participation and success in basketball at Lanier, the Voks players not only learned how to be American but also taught their white counterparts to question long-held assumptions about Mexican Americans.
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