Essential Questions Specialty Area 5
All students completing SA 5 are required to read the pages in the text related to their topic; and have a clear understanding of the broader issues related to the Texas Revolution 

Part I: Background to Texas Revolution
1.  Analyze Mexico's Independence from Spain
  • a.  When did Mexico successfully achieve independence from Spain?
  • b.  What role did Santa Ana play in Mexico's fight for Independence?
  • c.  What problems did Mexico face after becoming a nation?
  • d.  How did Mexico's problems impact the Northern Mexican state of Texas?
  • e. Who was Father Miguel Hildalgo y Costilla?
    • What was his position on slavery and Indians?
    • How did he inspire the Mexican War for Independence from Spain?
2. Analyze the role of the Empresarios in leading to the Texan Revolt.
  • a.  What were Empresarios?
  • b.  Why were settlers drawn to Texas under the leadership of the Empresarios? 
  • c. Why did Mexico begin using Empresarios in Texas?
3.  Americans in Texas
  • a. What conflicts arose between U.S. settlers and the Mexican government?  Why?
  • b.  What were setters in Texas required to do  by the Mexican government in order to settle in Texas? 
  • c.  Why were Texans concerned when Mexico negated their Constitution?
4. Who was Stephen F. Austin?
  • a. What did he accomplish in Texas, and what was his role in the Texas Revolution?
​5.  Who were Tejanos?
  • a. What role  did they play in the Texas Revolution?

​​Your Thesis:
SO WHAT?  While completing your research what conclusions did you draw? Why does this topic matter, how do the events you studied change history?  Write a one paragraph thesis that addresses what is important about this subject & what should people remember.
Part II: Texan Revolution 
​6. Who was Sam Houston?
  • a. What did he accomplish in Texas?
  • b. What was his role in the Texas Revolution and what was his fate
​
7. Who was Antonio López de Santa Anna?
  • a. What was his role in the Texas Revolution?
  • b. What was his fate?​​

8. What occurred at the Battle of the Alamo?
  • a. Who was involved in the Battle of the Alamo? What was their fate?
  • b. Where did the Battle take play and what was the impact of the Battle of the Alamo?
  • c.  What occurred at the Battle of the Alamo?

9. What occurred at the Battle (Massacre) of Goliad?
  • a. What occurred at the Massacre of Goliad?
  • b. Who was involved in the Battle of Goliad? What was their fate?
  • c. Where did the Battle take play and what was the impact of the Battle?​
10. Where occurred at the Battle of San Jacinto?
  • a. What occurred at the Battle of San Jacinto?
  • b. Who was involved in the Battle of San Jacinto? What was their fate?
  • c.  Where did the Battle take play and what was the impact of the Battle?
11. What did President Jackson think might happen if the United States annexed Texas? Explain

​When completing your research on key battles be sure to not simply research troop movements and give a battle synopsis- include stories that make these battles real and relevant.

​​
Your Thesis:
SO WHAT?  While completing your research what conclusions did you draw? Why does this topic matter, how do the events you studied change history?  Write a one paragraph thesis that addresses what is important about this subject & what should people remember.

Web links to Research, Project Helps and Online Presentation Assitance

The "Project Assistance" button above will give you access to numerous websites that can assist you in creating web based projects.  Regardless of your chosen project take a few minutes to review the available web sites, you might find something you were not previously aware of that will be of interest to you!
The "Willowcreek Library Texts and Tools" button above will link you to the Alexandria Library.  Within the Alexandria library any books with the call number starting with "REF" or a number are informational texts, conversely any call number starting with "FIC", "PB", or "SC" are fictional texts.  To access books tagged for the Texas Revolution, go to the search page, type in  "ness tex rev" and/ or "ness west"  hit search. on the top right hand corner click on the "find more" box. To assist in your search, go to the top drop down menu "unsorted" and sort by "Call Number", this will categorize the fiction and informational texts,posting the informational texts (excluding reference texts) on the top; in addition it will indicate the order of the texts on the stacks.  Identify the call number to find the text on the stacks.

Page Numbers in the Text Specialty Area 5

Picture
Call to Freedom
Pages: 546-551
Page: 347
Page: 345
Pages: 338-341
Page: 549
Pages: 310-311
Page: 324
Page: 432, 
Pages: 344-348
American History 
Pages: 373-374
Pages: 430-434
Page:  640-643 
 Picture
Discovering our Past
​Pages: Chapter 13, 353-357

Instructor Created Materials

Below is an outstanding newspaper written and edited by Bethany E. on the Texas Revolution.  The information can assist students in completing the questions on SA 22: The Texas Revolution.
Instructional Presentation "The Texas Revolution" written and taught by Dylan N. 

Student Created Materials

Instructional video "The Texas Revolution", written and produced by Ashton D. 

Suggested Websites for Specialty Area 5 

Suggested Novels for Specialty Area 5 

Title: Across the wide and lonesome prairie: the Oregon Trail diary of Hattie Campbell
Author: Kristina Gregory
Synopsis: In her diary, thirteen-year old Hattie chronicles her family's arduous 1847 journey from Missouri to Oregon on the Oregon Trail.
Title: All the Stars in the Sky; the Sante Fe trial diary of Florrie Mack Ryder
Author: Megan Mcdonald
Synopsis: A girl's diary records the year 1848 during which she, her brother, mother, and stepfather traveled the Sante Fe trail from independence, Missouri, to Sante Fe.

Title: The Journal of Douglas Allen Deeds; the Donner Party Expedition
Author: Rodman Philbrick
Synopsis: Douglas Deeds, a fifteen-year-old orphan, keeps a journal of his travels by wagon train as a member of the ill-fated Donner Party, which became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846-47.
Title: The Journal of Jedidiah Barstow; an emigrant on the Oregon Trail
Author: Ellen Levine
Synopsis: In his 1845 diary, thirteen-year-old orphan Jedidiah describes his wagon train journey to Oregon, in which he confronts rivers and sandy plains, bears ad rattlesnakes, and the challenges of living with his fellow travelers. Includes historical notes.
Title: Seeds of Hope: the Gold Rush Diary of Susanna Fairchild, California Territory
Author: Kristina Gregory
Synopsis: A diary account of fourteen-year-old Susanna Fairchild's life in 1849, when her father succumbs to gold fever on the way to establish his medical practice in Oregon after losing his wife and money on their steamship journey from New York. Includes a historical note.
Title: Westward to Home
Author: Patricia Hermes
Synopsis: In 1848, nine-year-old Joshua Martin McCullogh writes a journal of his family's journey from Missouri t Oregon in a covered wagon. Includes a historical note about Westward migration.
_Title: The collected short stories of Louis L'Amour
Author: Louis L'Amour
A collection of frontier stories by the acclaimed author.
Title: Beyond the great snow mountains
Author: Louis L'Amour
Synopsis: By the water of San Tadeo -- Meeting at Falmouth -- Roundup in Texas-- Sideshow champion-- Crash landing under the hanging wall-- Coast Patrol-- The Gravel Pit-- The money punch-- Beyond the great snow mountains-- A note of dedication-- Afterword. A collection of ten short stories by Louis L'Amour.
Title: Charlotte's Rose
Author: A. E. Cannon
Synopsis: As a twelve-year-old Welsh immigrant carries a motherless baby along the Mormon Trail in 1856, she comes to love the baby as her own and fears the day the baby's father will reclaim her.
Title: The Cherokee Trail
Author: Louis L'Amour
Synopsis: Mary Breydon came to manage a rundown stagecoach station on the Cherokee Trail after her Virginia home burned to ashes in the Civil War and her husband was shot down on the way to Colorado. She had to make a new life for herself and her daughter.
Title: Boston Jane: An adventure
Author: Jennifer L. Holm
Synopsis: Sequel: Boston Jane: Wilderness Days. Schooled in the lessons of etiquette for young ladies of 1854, Miss Jane Peck of Philadelphia finds little use for manners during her long sea voyage to the Pacific Northwest and while living among the American traders and Chinock Indians of Washington Territory.

Title: By the Great Horn Spoon!
Author Sid Fleischman ; illustrated by Eric von Schmidt
Jack and his aunt's butler, Praiseworthy, stow away on a ship bound for California during the Gold Rush of "49."
Title: The ox-bow incident (19-21) CLASSIC, ADVANCED READER
Author: Clark, Walter Van Tilburg
Set in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident is a searing and realistic portrait of frontier life and mob violence in the American West. First published in 1940, it focuses on the lynching of three innocent men and the tragedy that ensues when law and order are abandoned. The result is an emotionally powerful, vivid, and unforgettable re-creation of the Western novel, which Clark transmuted into a universal story about good and evil, individual and community, justice and human nature.
Title: The outlaws of mesquite frontier stories (19-20)
Author: Louis L'Amour.
The outlaws of Mesquite -- Love and the Cactus Kid -- The ghost maker -- The drift -- etc.
Title: Roughing it CLASSIC, ADVANCED READER (19-20)
Author: Mark Twain ; with a foreword by Leonard Kriegel ; revised and updated bibliography.
Roughing It is a series of sketches and essays about Twain’s time spent in the American west and the colorful characters he met along the way
Title: Valley of the sun: frontier stories (19-21)
Author: Louis L'Amour.
Includes nine stories of the American frontier, where men and women of indomitable courage, honor, and individualism fight to survive and stake their claim to the future.
Title: West against the wind (19-20)
Author: Liza Ketchum Murrow.
Fourteen-year-old Abby seeks both her father and the secret of a handsome but mysterious boy during an arduous journey by wagon train from the middle of the country to the Pacific coast in
Title: The devil's paintbox (19-21)
Author: Victoria McKernan
Orphans Aidan and his sister Maddy leave drought-stricken Kansas on a wagon train hoping for a better life in Seattle.
Title: Doe Sia: Bannock girl and the handcart pioneers (19-21)
Author: Kenneth Thomasma ; Agnes Vincen Talbot, illustrator.
After meeting Emma, who is part of a band of Mormons making their way to Salt Lake City in 1856, Doe Sia, a young Bannock girl, proves her friendship when the two are caught in a brutal snow storm.
Title: The game of silence (19-21)
Author: Louise Erdrich
Sequel to: The birchbark house.Nine-year-old Omakayas, of the Ojibwa tribe, moves west with her family in 1849.
Title: High trail to danger (19-20)
Author: Joan Lowery Nixon.
In 1879 seventeen-year-old Sarah travels from Chicago to the violent town of Leadtown, Colorado, to locate her missing father, but she finds that the mention of his name brings her strange looks and an attempt on her life.
Title: I have heard of a land (19-20)
Author: Joyce Carol Thomas ; illustrated by Floyd Cooper
Describes the experiences of an African-American pioneer woman who stakes a claim for free land in the Oklahoma Territory
Title: Jenny of the Tetons (19-21)
Author: Kristiana Gregory.
Orphaned by an Indian raid while traveling West with a wagon train, fifteen-year-old Carrie Hill is befriended by the English trapper Beaver Dick and taken to live with his Indian wife Jenny and their six children.
Title: The journal of Brian Doyle: a greenhorn on an Alaskan whaling ship (19-20)
Author: Jim Murphy.
A fictional diary in which young Brian Doyle records how he ran away from his home in San Francisco in 1784, joined the crew of a whaling ship, and endured storms, hostile shipmates, and being stranded in the Arctic.
Title: The journal of Douglas Allen Deeds: the Donner Party expedition (19-20)
Author: Rodman Philbrick.
Douglas Deeds, a fifteen-year-old orphan, keeps a journal of his travels by wagon train as a member of the ill-fated Donner Party, which became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846-47.
Title: The legend of Jimmy Spoon (19-21)
Author: Kristiana Gregory.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, twelve-year-old Jimmy leaves his Mormon family in Utah and ends up living with the Shoshoni Indians as the younger brother of Chief Washakie.
Title: Letters from the corrugated castle: a novel of gold rush California, 1850-1852 (19-20)
Author: Joan W. Blos
A series of letters and newspaper articles reveals life in California in the 1850s.
Title: Little town on the prairie (19-20)
Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder ; illustrated by Garth Williams.
Pa's homestead thrives, Laura gets her first job in town, blackbirds eat the corn and oats crops, Mary goes to college, and Laura gets into trouble at school, but becomes a certified school teacher.
Title: My face to the wind: the diary of Sarah Jane Price, a prairie teacher (19-20)
Author: Jim Murphy.
Title: Nothing here but stones (19-20)
Author: Nancy Oswald
In 1882, ten-year-old Emma and her family, along with other Russian Jewish immigrants, arrive in Cotopaxi, Colorado, where they face inhospitable conditions as they attempt to start an agricultural colony, and lonely Emma is comforted by the horse whose life she saved.
Title: The Oregon Trail (19-20) GRAPHIC NOVEL
Author: Joeming Dunn ; illustrated by Tim Smith, III.
Travel the Oregon Trail with emigrants in graphic novel format.
Title: Sallie Fox: the story of a pioneer girl (19-21)
Author: Dorothy Kupcha Leland ; cover design and illustrations by Diane Wilde
A fictionalized account of 12-year-old Sallie Fox's arduous trek by wagon train with her family from Iowa to California in the mid 1800s. Along the way, they are beset by Indian attacks, drought, illness, and personality clashes. What begins as an exciting adventure becomes an ordeal, days and days without water and animals and people dying at an alarming rate. Sally shares her fear of Indians and her excitement about buffalo hunting.
_Title: West along the wagon road 1852 (19-20)
Author: Laurie Lawlor.
Everyone on the wagon train knew Harriet "Duck" Scott was looking for adventure, as the Scott family left Illinois for the faraway Oregon Territory.
Title: West to a land of plenty: the diary of Teresa Angelino Viscardi (19-21)
Author: Jim Murphy.
While traveling in 1883 with her Italian American family (including a meddlesome little sister) and other immigrant pioneers to a utopian community in Idaho, fourteen-year-old Teresa keeps a diary of her experiences along the way.
Title: May B (19-20)
Author: Caroline Star Rose
May is helping out on a neighbor's Kansas prairie homestead—just until Christmas, says Pa. She wants to contribute, but it's hard to be separated from her family by 15 long, unfamiliar miles. Then the unthinkable happens: May is abandoned. Trapped in a tiny snow-covered sod house, isolated from family and neighbors, May must prepare for the oncoming winter. While fighting to survive, May's memories of her struggles with reading at school come back to haunt her. But she's determined to find her way home again. Caroline Starr Rose's fast-paced novel, written in beautiful and riveting verse, gives readers a strong new heroine to love.
Picture
See Below For Available Films and Podcasts Related to Specialty Area 

War & Expansion: Crash Course US History #17

Published on Jun 6, 2013
In which John Green teaches you about the Mexican-American War in the late 1840s, and the expansion of the United States into the western end of North America. In this episode of Crash Course, US territory finally reaches from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean. After Oregon was secured from the UK and the southwest was ceded by Mexico, that is. Famous Americans abound in this episode, including James K Polk (Young Hickory, Napoleon of the Stump), Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, and Winfield Scott. You'll also learn about the California Gold Rush of 1848, and California's admission as a state, which necessitated the Compromise of 1850. Once more slavery is a crucial issue. Something is going to have to be done about slavery, I think. Maybe it will come to a head next week.

THE ALAMO - THE COMPLETE STORY

Episode 25 from the series GREAT MILITARY BATTLES, produced in 2012 by the History Channell

The Founding of Texas

The Founding of Texas Pt 1 of 2:  Excerpt from The History Channel's "The Real West" hosted by Kenny Rogers about the early years of Texas including Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston, and the battles of the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto. Published in 2002
Founding of Texas Part II of II

History of the Texas Rangers

Published on Aug 13, 2013
Allen Public Library Presents ... History of the Texas Rangers
July 25, 2013
Midwestern State University history professor Michael Collins talks about the history of the Texas Rangers as one of the most respected law enforcement units in American history. Collins is the author of Texas Devils: Rangers and Regulars on the Lower Rio Grande, 1846-1861 and That Damned Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and the American West, 1883-1898.
Collins discusses his upcoming book on the "skinning wars" in South Texas in the 1870s. A Crooked River: Rustlers, Rangers and Regulars on the Lower Rio Grande (1863-1877) will tell how ranchers raided properties, killed cattle and took the hide.