SAGE

Lone Star Politics: Tradition and Transformation in Texas, Sixth Edition Ken Collier, Steven Galatas, and Julie Harrelson-Stephens See page 12 for details. three authors make clear in Lone Star's preface. They quote an earlier chronicler of Texas, Anna Hardwicke Pennybacker: "No one who learns well the lessons taught can fail to become a better and wiser citizen." "I think," says Collier, "20 years ago, there was much more curiosity about the other side. They felt like they could draw out these arguments without making people really, really mad. Now they're afraid that they're going to get into a really hostile situation, and they just don't want to launch the conversation. Just trying to make them a little bit more comfortable with it is the first step." Luckily, Texas really is different from the rest of the country. Galatas, who penned a number of "Texas versus other states" boxes in the book, and who is the only non-native on the authorship team, explains: "The institutional framework of Texas state government is very different from other states. There's a lot more complexity to Texas state governments. A state like Kansas is pretty straightforward. Texas is not." A large part of that is cultural, Texas was an independent country before it became a state. Texas was also a slave state but with a very constrained area where slavery was practiced. It was a Dust Bowl state with swamps and deserts and border state with huge areas far from the international boundary. "And that cultural component includes the frontier experience," Galatas notes, "which in Texas is really almost on steroids." So it should be no surprise that when polarization threatens to disrupt the proceedings, talk about legendary individuals in Texas history and how they shaped state politics and culture can keep the conversation lively but civil. "In the textbook we talk a lot about systems," Collier says, "but then we put these boxes in about legends, and frame them as individuals—but also frame them as legends, where there's often as much mythology as reality. We try to keep those personalities from eclipsing understanding the system, but there are just some moments in Texas history that are hard to understand without talking about some of the legendary movers and shakers like Sam Houston and the revolution, or Lyndon Johnson and the interesting elections he was part of." IRVING, TEXAS, USA-MAR 2, 2018: Yard signs on a residential street near library for primary election day in Dallas county. Texas Politics 7

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