Lone Star Vistas

As Texas became a destination for large-scale immigration in the wake of Mexico’s independence from Spain, many learned of the region through published travelogues, emigrant guides, and scientific reports. Lone Star Vistas is the first comparative study of transnational travel writing on Texas, analyzing 40 years of work from the three major settler populations: Anglo-American, Mexican, and German. Haas explores how these vivid accounts shaped public knowledge and created the very idea of Texas. ~The Alcalde

Lone Star Vistas is an intellectually sophisticated study that critically examines Anglo-American, Mexican, and German travel writings as discursive colonial constructions of Texas landscapes and cultures. Astrid Haas’s greatest accomplishment is her detailed analysis of how Anglo-Americans constructed, rationalized, and institutionalized a racial ideological hierarchy, by putting in conversation their Manifest Destiny claims to Texas against the German critique of the callous ways American enterprise evolved. Haas also offers a unique analysis of Mexican scientific and military travelogues, which provides new insights into nineteenth-century Mexican scholarship about Texas. Highly recommended. ~Martha Menchaca

In the nineteenth century Texas became an important destination for large-scale immigration from both North America and Europe. Europeans, especially, became aware of Texas through a plentitude of published travelogues, emigrant guides, and scientific reports. These are important not only for their historical depictions of Texas but also for what they reveal about the writers of the period and the sensibilities they represented. By focusing on representative commentaries in this thoroughly researched and well-documented study, Astrid Haas has revisited former perspectives on Texas while elucidating important cultural contexts that made Texas appealing as a destination for both European and Anglo immigration. ~James C. Kearney

Astrid Haas’s thoroughly researched and richly detailed book is an important contribution to inter-American studies and early borderlands studies. Lone Star Vistas reveals how Texan landscapes and cultures served as a canvas for the projection of a multitude of spatial imaginations created by Mexican, Anglo-American, and German travelers. This well-written study gives deep insight into the ways scientists, the military, settlers, professionals, visitors, and immigrants with different agendas helped shape public knowledge of a region that few people in the antebellum period had a chance to travel to. ~Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez

Haas’s well-written treatment of this diverse collection of travelogues highlights the deeply held racist attitudes of Anglo-American and European visitors and settlers toward the Native American and mixed-blood Hispanic peoples they encountered in Texas, as well as their almost unanimous tolerance of Black slavery, which structurally embedded deep divisions into the future. Fortunately, this volume provides yet more well-documented evidence refuting current political discourses in Texas and across the United States condemning critical race studies as an unfounded creation of the academy. ~Journal of Southern History

The different travelogues that Haas analyses offer a glimpse at the evolution of opinions about the many parts of Texas by contemporaries as German and Anglo American settlers began populating the area...The manuscript itself offers scholars of this period a thoroughly-detailed road map for further research into the literature and lives of lesser-known figures of early Texas. ~Western Historical Quarterly

[A] cogent and detailed examination of travel narratives about Texas from Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821 to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861...Haas’s meticulous research and broad net gives her work authority and relevance. Scholars interested in Texas history and the early narrative construction of the state will find Lone Star Vistas a must-read. ~Western American Literature