I’ll admit: Having grown addicted to the treats of literary nonfiction, I don’t make it through too many academic histories these days. If I’m going to, there’d better at least be a decent lede—and the Marxian opening to a new history of the eugenics movement in Texas fits the bill.

“Monsters haunted the imaginations of some of the most educated white Texans from the 1850s to the dawn of World War II,” tees off The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas, a 300-page (endnotes included) work by husband-wife historians Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf. 

Philips, who recently retired from a teaching position at the University of North Texas in Denton, previously authored White Metropolis, a well-regarded history of race in Dallas.

The new book, out June 3 from University of Oklahoma Press, unearths a cast of unsavory Texas characters who pushed eugenics—the discredited pseudoscientific belief that the human species should be improved through practices such as forced sterilization—from the mid-19th century through the 1930s. In the latter decades of that period, the majority of U.S. states enacted forced-sterilization laws that targeted the non-white and the disabled, leading to more than 60,000 coerced operations. But Texas, perhaps surprisingly, never passed such a law. 

“Although a violent and white supremacist place, Texas remained on the sideline during this particular American carnage,” the authors write. The reasons why are the book’s most interesting subject.

Though the Lone Star State ultimately resisted eugenics, it was home to early pioneers. A Georgia-Texas transplant, Gideon Lincecum was a botanist and surgeon who “one day in the 1850s took it upon himself to castrate an alcohol-dependent patient in Texas, an assault he said cured his involuntary test subject’s addiction.” Lincecum did so before the term eugenics had even been coined, and he became one of the earliest advocates of treating humans more like a breeder treats horses or dogs. Lincecum managed to get the nation’s first forced-sterilization bill put before the Texas Legislature in 1853. But Lincecum, much too far ahead of his time, saw the bill fizzle amid “copious mockery.” 

F.E. Daniel, another physician and editor of the Texas Medical Journal from the 1880s until the 1910s, pushed for forced vasectomy and hysterectomy to assure Anglo-Saxon dominance, the book’s authors report. Daniel “embodied the values of the southern Progressive movement,” a particular turn-of-the-century brew that mixed scientific rationalism with rank racism. Eugenicists also made inroads at Texas universities, particularly UT-Austin and Rice. 

But Progressives and egghead professors were poor messengers in a state where politicians like “Pa” and “Ma” Ferguson stoked right-wing populist prejudice against government and academic elites—and where religious fundamentalism was a rising political power. Eugenicist proposals, whether focused on sterilization or restricting who could marry, continued to fail. 

“Attacks on colleges and universities, therefore, provided the unintentional benefit of shielding the poor and politically powerless in Texas from a horrifying, widely shared elite agenda that prevailed elsewhere,” the authors write. In fact, liberal California was the nation’s eugenic epicenter, where deference to academic expertise helped fuel the largest number of forced sterilizations among states—a practice continued through 1980. 

Further frustrating the Texas eugenicists, a large portion of the state’s capitalists depended on cheap Mexican labor and weren’t going to forsake their bottom lines over abstract concerns about race-mixing. John Box, an East Texas Congressman, attempted to overcome these employers when federal lawmakers passed the deeply racist Immigration Act of 1924, which sought to halt immigration from Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe. Box pushed for a cap on Mexican immigration, too, but the Western Hemisphere was ultimately exempted.

“To the wealthy landowners exploiting migrant labor, the threat of paying higher wages proved far more frightening than any dysgenic nightmare that Box and his allies could conjure,” the authors write.

Ultimately, the combination of greedy capitalists, right-wing anti-intellectualism, and solidifying religious opposition (Catholics grew rapidly in Texas during these decades, and the Vatican explicitly opposed forced sterilization in 1930) doomed eugenicist legislation that was considered in Austin between the 1850s and the 1930s. In an email to the Observer, Philips called this “a unique alignment that led one set of bad ideas … to defeat another malign worldview.” Soon, the eugenics movement began its fall from grace nationwide as the discovery of Hitler’s concentration camps generally tarnished proposals for racial engineering.

The history laid out in this book could tempt one to reassess today’s right-wing populist attacks on academia. Perhaps these, too, could end up being right for the wrong reasons. But Philips doesn’t think so.

He attributes universities’ erstwhile embrace of eugenics to higher education’s status as “almost universally white, straight, American-born, male, and wealthy.” More diverse scholarly bodies would have likely eschewed such ideas; a Jewish anthropologist, Franz Boas, eventually did help puncture the movement’s pseudoscience, for example. “That’s why the attacks [today] on diversity, equity, and inclusion today are so dangerous,” Philips wrote the Observer. “It threatens to make universities more like they were at the time eugenics became widely accepted wisdom.”

The book takes a pass through more recent figures trying to revive race science in America, like Charles Murray and Richard Spencer, and the authors also highlight the eugenics-adjacent rhetoric of today’s rabidly xenophobic politicians—namely the U.S. president and the governor of Texas. A bit more provocatively, they tie threads between eugenics and the current fight over abortion. While some on the right make hay of the historic ties between eugenics and early advocates for reproductive rights, the authors take another tack by focusing on the power allowed or disallowed to the state.

“The battle over the right of the state to control reproduction once centered on preventing children labeled as dysgenic from being born. By 2023, the state decided it could force women to give birth even when the child had no chance of survival,” they write. “The two great battles in Texas over government power and bodily integrity since the 1850s, eugenics and abortion, had very dif­ferent outcomes.”

The post The History of Eugenics in Texas Isn’t What You Think appeared first on www.texasobserver.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The content critically examines historical and contemporary issues linked to eugenics, racial discrimination, and right-wing populism, emphasizing the negative impact of these ideologies and highlighting progressive critiques such as the dangers of attacks on diversity and inclusion. While it acknowledges complexities within politics and history, the article leans toward a center-left perspective by focusing on social justice, systemic racism, and the defense of academic and reproductive freedoms.

SUMMARY: The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) is investigating over 145 unsolved homicides, with 13 prioritized cases involving victims from children to adults. These cold cases span decades and regions in Texas, including Dallas, Houston, Universal City, Lubbock, and more. Notable cases include 7-year-old Elizabeth Lynne Barclay, missing and murdered in 1979, and the 1980 Christmas Day murders of Estella and Andrew Salinas in Houston. Other cases involve victims like Yolanda Herrera (1981), Richard Garza (1984), and Marianne Wilkinson (2007), each with unresolved circumstances. Texans can submit tips to the Texas Rangers or Crime Stoppers for assistance in solving these cases.

Read the full article

The post LIST: Top priority cold homicide cases Texas Rangers are still trying to solve appeared first on www.kxan.com

“New floods lead to rescues and evacuations across Texas” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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A storm system brought a new round of dangerous flooding across North and Central Texas on Sunday, leading to rescues and evacuations in multiple counties and suspending search efforts for victims of catastrophic floods that killed at least 120 people in the Hill Country a week ago.

Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday afternoon that the state was conducting rescues in San Saba, Lampasas and Schleicher counties, with evacuations taking place in Lampasas, Menard, Kimble and Sutton counties.

“We are expanding operations in all affected counties — all while monitoring the rising waters in Kerrville,” Abbott said in a post on X. Kerrville, in Kerr County, is where rescue and recovery operations have focused after the Fourth of July floods in the Hill Country.

Dozens of Texans had been rescued from the Lampasas area by mid-Sunday afternoon, Abbott said. One rescue was made in Schleicher County Sunday morning, according to the county Sheriff’s Office.

Some rescues have also been made in San Saba County, Emergency Management Coordinator Marsha Hardy said, as police and volunteers spread out this morning to alert residents of both mandatory and recommended evacuation orders.

Hardy said the evacuations have gone without issue, and she hopes the rest of the rain won’t cause any more major problems so they can shift to recovery efforts.

“It’s now a matter, once again, of everybody working their way back home, probably tomorrow, and seeing what kind of damage they might have received,” Hardy said.

Sunday afternoon, U.S. Rep. August Pfluger R-Texas, who represents San Saba, posted: “Please take this seriously as the river is rising faster than it did on July 4.”

Officials in Kendall and Menard counties told residents in some parts that evacuations are currently voluntary.

Emergency crews in Kerr County suspended their search for victims of last week’s flash floods on Sunday morning, resuming in the western parts of Kerr County by 3 p.m. The Ingram Fire Department ordered search crews to immediately evacuate the Guadalupe River corridor until further notice, warning the potential for flash floods was high.

Search and rescue efforts were expected to resume on Monday, depending on river flow, Fire Department spokesperson Brian Lochte said.

On a Facebook post, the department warned area residents to stay away from river beds and roads.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported “major” floods at the San Saba River at San Saba, which reached 27 feet by 1:30 p.m. Sunday, and at the Lampasas River at Kempner, which reached 33 feet. San Saba County Judge Jody Fauley issued a mandatory evacuation order for some parts of the county as the National Weather Service forecast the San Saba River would crest higher than 31 feet by midnight.

By 3:20 p.m. Sunday, floodwaters had begun to recede in Lampasas, said Julian Thorpe, a communications representative at the Lampasas Sheriff’s Office.

“We’ve made sure everyone has been evacuated from the areas that need to be evacuated. The only ongoing issue that I’m aware of is that the Kempner bridge is blocked off,” Thorpe said, adding that he didn’t have details about rescues in the area.

NOAA also reported “moderate” floods at the Leon River at Gatesville and Cowhouse Creek near Pidcoke in Coryell County and at the Llano River near Junction in Kimble County.

Sunday evening, the National Weather Service extended its flood watch for the region to 9 a.m. Monday, explaining that one to three inches of rain was possible overnight.

An alert from the weather service’s Austin-San Antonio office issued early Sunday warned that the Central Texas region is particularly susceptible to flooding as the soil remains “near to saturation or at saturation levels” from the July 4 storms.

That weekend, the destructive, fast-moving waters rose 26 feet on the Guadalupe River in just 45 minutes before daybreak on July 4, washing away homes and vehicles. Ever since, searchers have used helicopters, boats and drones to look for victims and to rescue people stranded in trees and from camps isolated by washed-out roads.

This summer, flash flooding driven by bursts of heavy rain turned deadly elsewhere in Texas. In San Antonio in June, more than 7 inches of rain fell over a span of hours, prompting dozens of rescues from the fast-rising floodwaters and killing at least 13.

With information from the Associated Press

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/13/texas-hill-country-flash-floods-search-suspended/.

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The post New floods lead to rescues and evacuations across Texas appeared first on feeds.texastribune.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

The article presents a straightforward report on flooding events and rescue efforts in Texas without promoting any ideological viewpoint. It includes statements from government officials of differing roles and provides factual updates on the situation. The language remains neutral and avoids politically charged framing or opinion. References to political figures like Gov. Greg Abbott and Rep. August Pfluger are factual and context-based rather than evaluative. Overall, the content adheres to objective news reporting, focusing on public safety and emergency response rather than partisan issues.