Richard Coke: Texan

Where the book came from

The interest started at Vanderbilt, where the author took up the nineteenth century history of his home state and, in it, the figure of Richard Coke, to whom he is related at a distance. What he found was a governor treated in a paragraph by the general histories and then set aside. The view that formed then, that historians had passed over most of Coke's public life, is the view the book was written to test.

What it is built on

The book rests on primary material. Personal correspondence and family records. The debates of the legislature and the proceedings of the constitutional convention. Newspapers of the period, census returns, and the city directories that recorded who lived and worked where, year by year. A generation ago that meant travel to several reading rooms; digitization put much of it on a desk, which allowed the author to work the originals repeatedly and in more depth than had been practical before.

The result covers more than one man. Coke's life runs through the years after the Civil War, the end of military rule in Texas, the writing of a new state constitution and two decades in Washington, so the book is also an account of how Texas was governed, and how its people lived, in the decades between the war and the turn of the century.

Recognition

Senate Resolution 520 came in the 89th Legislature. Senator Hall brought it to the floor, it named this book as the reason, and it passed without objection with every senator signed on as a co author. He has also presented the research behind the book at the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association.

On this site

The essays under Writing do not retell the book. They are about the research: what a single record proves and does not, how a date was pinned down when the sources disagreed, and what the years Coke lived through look like from inside the documents. The publisher's author page carries the publication details.