Search Results

"But a Mournful Remedy": Divorce in Two Texas Counties, 1841-1880
Little scholarship has been dedicated to nineteenth-century Texas family life and no published scholarship to date has addressed the more specific topic of divorce. This study attempts to fill that gap in the historiography through a quantitative analysis of 373 divorce actions filed in Washington and Harrison Counties. The findings show a high degree of equity between men and women in court decisions granting divorces, and in property division and custody rulings. Texas women enjoyed a relatively high degree of legal and personal autonomy, which can be attributed, in part, to a property-rights heritage from Spanish civil law.
Class and Freedom of Choice in the Marriage Patterns of Antebellum Texas Women
Little scholarly analysis has been devoted to the hypothesis that antebellum Texas women generally married within their own socioeconomic (slaveholding) class, and thus had only limited choice in the selection of marriage partners. This quantitatively based investigation suggests that the popular image should be carefully qualified. This study reveals that although a majority of Texas women who married during the early 1850s chose men who had the same slaveholding status, a significant minority crossed class lines. By using marriage records of the period in correlation with information gleaned from the census, conclusions were reached. Contemporary women's diaries, letters and reminiscences were investigated, in addition to a historiography of marriage in the South, which created the background for this study.
Portal to Texas History Newspaper OCR Text Dataset: Brenham
Dataset of OCR text from The Portal to Texas History and the Texas Digital Newspaper Program. This dataset includes titles from Brenham Texas from the years 1876 to 1923. Titles included in this dataset include: Brenham Banner, Brenham Daily Banner, Brenham Daily Banner-Press, Brenham Evening Press, Brenham Weekly Banner, Brenham WEekly Banner-Press, and The Daily Banner. In all there are 10,720 issues comprised of 50,368 pages of text.
Back to Top of Screen