texas

History Friday – Plaza Mayor

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San Fernando Cathedral and the Plaza Today
That is what they were called in towns and cities in Spain the main plaza or town square, which served as the center of civic life, around which were ranged the important civic buildings, the biggest church; this the regular market place, the assembly area for every kind of public spectacle imaginable over the centuries. Every plaza mayor in every Spanish town is alike and yet different; different in size and shape, and in the confirmation of the buildings around it. Some are bare and paved in cobbles, and some have trees and gardens in them now.

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Give Me Land, Lots of Land

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This would appear to be the new theme song for the Fed-Gov’s Bureau of Land Management that bane of ranchers like Cliven Bundy as well as a whole lot of other ranchers, farmers, loggers, small landowners, and owners of tiny bits of property on the edge of or in areas of spectacular natural beauty, west of the Mississippi and between the Mexican and Canadian borders.

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History Friday – 1836 Timeline – Goliad

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(For today, another series of photos taken at a reenactment event; the Coleto Creek Fight and the mass execution of the Texians at Goliad; background here. This takes place every year at the La Bahia presidio, just outside the town of Goliad. (The chapel is original, the walls of the citadel a careful reconstruction. Of all the locations associated with the Texas war of independence, this is the only one which looks pretty much as it did in 1836. I’d posted some of these before at Chicagoboyz, but not all.)

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History Friday: Do Not Cross the 1836 Time Line

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(During the months of February, March and April, reenactor groups are busy in Texas, at the sites of key events in the War for Independence, doing encampments and recreations of events: The siege of the Alamo, the Coleto Creek fight/Goliad Massacre, and the Battle of San Jacinto. Below the jump are pictures that I took a couple of years ago at the first event Next week – the Goliad reenactment)

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To Become the ‘Other’

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I suppose that my thoughts were running this week on the theory and practice of ‘otherizing’ because my work in the Tiny Bidness has brought me full-face with a prime example of how upright good citizens, patriotic as they saw it, were brought by a turn of the political wheel into being accused criminals, brought before a military commission and charged with crimes which if found guilty of by the tribunal could have drawn a capital sentence. That the several found guilty of disloyalty to the régime and sentenced to death, imprisonment, exile or a heavy fine did in most cases, escape the worst of it and return to lives of post-war prosperity and respect must have been of cold comfort at the time.

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