The Vanished Coast Lecture by Mark Lardas
People associate Texas with cowboys and cattle, cotton and oil. Today, Texas is high-tech: the Telecom Corridor in Dallas, computers in Austin, NASA in Houston. Many think of Texas as a product of its land. Yet Texas has always been influenced by the sea. For 350 years, the sea carried Texas history. It brought explorers, castaways, pirates, empresarios, immigrants and cargoes. It carried away Texas’s agricultural goods, bringing wealth to the state. Before the railroad and telegraph, the sea was the quickest way to communicate with the state or for the state to communicate with the outside world. The sea made Texas what it is today, invisibly influencing Texas from its beginnings through the present. This talk, and the book The Vanished Texas Coast explore those connections.
