Bastrop Historical Society Quarterly Meeting

How Cotton Transformed Mexico's Far North into the American Southwest In conjunction with the opening of one of our latest permanent museum exhibits, When Cotton Was King, the Bastrop County Historical Society is proud to present: Professor Andrew J. Torget 19th Century Historian University of North Texas ? Friday Evening, July 21 6:30 PM Calvary Heritage Hall, 1020 Main Street, Bastrop Andrew Torget, historian and professor at the University of North Texas, will give a lecture based on his new book, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States, and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s. Andrew J. Torget is a historian of nineteenth-century North America at the University of North Texas, where he directs a digital humanities lab. A veteran of pioneering work in digital scholarship, he has been a featured speaker at Harvard, Stanford, Rice, Duke, Johns Hopkins, and the Library of Congress. In 2011, he was named the inaugural David J. Weber Research Fellow at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. His most recent book, Seeds of Empire, won eleven book prizes and awards.