Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of Texas
by Andrew J. Torget

The Heritage Society Tea Room
Free for members, $5 for non-members

Andrew J. 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.