Welcome to another new history of old Texas bonus episode. So on the heels of the anniversary

of the Battle of Medina and on the heels of some exciting progress in our search for the battlefield,

I thought I'd share with y'all here a talk that I did earlier this year. It was inspired by my

most recent season on the Republic of the Rio Grande, but it's relevant to our Battle of Medina

search as well.

See if you buy my argument that maybe, just maybe, the reason that Texans have such a disproportionate pride in their independence is because we have our very own definition of independence,

of autonomy within a tradition, or at least a slightly different notion of those ideals than the Anglo-American world holds.

I hope you enjoy.

Thank you. I've got a loud here.

Good afternoon, and thank you again for having me. Welcome to my hometown here of San Antonio.

I'm going to try to distill for you guys in about 20, 30 or minutes what it's taken me about 30 hours to talk about in the course of a podcast that I have, which is called a new history of Old Texas.

And the inspiration for the podcast is the fact that I have worked on and off at least for most of the last 20 years in northern Mexico.

And I just continue to be fascinated by all the ways in which I find the cultural and even ideological foundations of Texas in northern Mexico, which may sound pretty self-evident if you know anything about the history of Texas.

But it wasn't ever taught to me explicitly.

And so it's kind of become a project of mine to relearn the history that I learned growing up.

And that's what I'm going to share a little bit with you today.

And starting with the first season I did, which was really about the founding in the early history of San Antonio.

So I tried to put myself back in the eyes of somebody here in 1700, and what would they have seen when they came to San Antonio?

I mean, the first thing, the reason why Native Americans settled here was this concentration of springs. It may have been

the greatest concentration of springs in the new world. And this is commemorated most famously

in the old Pearl Beer slogan, if you guys remember this. This is from the land of 1100 springs.

And there's all these stories of people trying to set foundations and springs popping up. And so anyway,

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