At midnight, Bob Dylan dropped the longest song he has ever recorded — a 17-minute, stream-of-conscious ballad about the JFK Assassination called Murder Most Foul. As Variety reports, it is the first new release of original material from Dylan since 2012, and why it comes now, we can only guess. Dylan released a cryptic statement with the midnight release that thanks his fans, says he hopes they find the song “interesting,” and tells them to “stay safe, stay observant.”

He leaves it to us to make what we can from the timing of the release. We are all living through a historic pandemic, nearly the entire country is in the midst of a lockdown, and many artists are releasing material or staging online concerts to help boost spirits. Listening to the new song, however, it feels like Dylan is doing more than gifting us with some new entertainment to get us through the lockdown.

The new track is a meandering, “Desolation Row”-style waterfall of free association; cryptic imagery; historical observations; and pop cultural, folkloric, and musical references. Drenched with Dylan’s characteristically wry mix of barbed critique and whimsical irony, the song is an elegy on the JFK Assassination and a meditation on the decline of the American empire. Murder Most Foul is also one of the best songs about Dallas ever written.

At the end of his 900-plus page Texas epic, author Stephen Harrigan comes to grips with the Lone Star State’s immensity. Writing a single-volume history of more than five centuries of Texas “was too much.” “Texas,” Harrigan relents, “was too large, too old.” Perhaps more charitable were the words of Georgia O’Keeffe—the inspiration for Harrigan’s title, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. Before becoming the exemplar of American modernist painting in the mid-twentieth century, O’Keeffe was the entirety of the art faculty at West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M) in Canyon. Her time in the Panhandle left her convinced that Texas was “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.”

For Harrigan—novelist, long-time Texas Monthly contributor, and all-around Texas man of letters—that bigness is a theme. It’s not just the miles upon miles of space and centuries upon centuries of time that prove daunting to cover. It’s the people, too. From the well-known—Sam Houston, Barbara Jordan, and Selena—to the fascinatingly obscure—Isabelle Talon, Satanta, and Fred Carrasco—Harrigan eschews Anglo triumphalism for a more realistic rendering of the white, African American, Hispanic, and Native American communities that populate the state’s history.

But before all that, he starts with the biggest Texan of all.

Harrigan’s entree into 500 years of Texas history is an ordinary autumn morning in Dallas. As the sun rose on October 19, 2012, Big Tex presided over Fair Park just as he had for the previous six decades. By sundown, however, the plus-sized patriarch of Texas’s yearly celebration lay in smoldering ruins.

For Harrigan, when Big Tex met his end in that conflagration, so too did an era in Texas history. The 52-foot tall cowboy was “a symbol of a simpler time” belonging “to a different Texas.” When the new Big Tex took his commanding spot in Fair Park he was “sort of a joke” put up “simply for nostalgia’s sake.” From the beginning the new Big Tex could be little more than an ironic place holder since “it was no longer possible for a single image…to truly evoke the heaving twenty-first-century mix of cultural allegiances and colliding identities that Texas had become.”

It was in that very spot, Harrigan tells us, that some seven decades earlier a group of elite Texans—headed by future Dallas Citizens Council founder R. L. Thornton—attempted to fashion such an image of cohesion amid diversity. Thornton and his coterie of rich and powerful Dallasites brought the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition to Fair Park—never mind the fact that Dallas hadn’t even existed a century hence when Anglo invaders and their Tejano allies wrested the state from Mexico.

I was a freshman in high school, sitting in 5th period government class. It was right after lunch. As soon as class began, I overheard a classmate say that while she was driving back to school from eating off campus, a local radio station said Selena died. Soon, the entire class was talking about it.

Back then, the internet wasn’t as ubiquitous as today. There was no place to get instant verified information. Luckily, our classroom had a radio which we quickly turned on and listened as a radio DJ confirmed the news. She was 23 years old. Beyond that, we knew little else. At least, not during the middle of a school day. As that class ended, and we walked the crowded halls to our next period, you could hear the halls buzzing with what had just happened. The entire thing felt surreal. I doubt I’ll ever forget where I was on the day Selena died.

I wasn’t a fan of Selena. I didn’t dislike her, but neither did I listen to her music. And yet, where I grew up in El Paso, it felt impossible not to know who she was. To know her songs, even if one didn’t seek out her music. To know how she smiled and how she danced. To know see she had charisma and see how others wanted to emulate her. Selena and her music were just there.

This year, March 31 will mark 25 years since the day Selena died. She has now been dead longer than she lived. In the last quarter-century, who Selena was has evolved into what she is now. She has become a symbol of identity, inspired murals and festivals. She remains an inspiration to those alive when she sang and danced and to those who only know her from music, videos, memories, and more. And because her popularity is seemingly just increasing decades past her death, Selena is also a commodity.

In this month’s issue of D Magazine, I wrote about Selena. Who she was, how she died, how Latinos in Dallas processed her death, and how—today—people here continue to honor all she represents.

With the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election only months away, candidates are on the campaign trail once again. Dallas has long been a campaign stop for numerous presidents, whether they were in office at the time, long out of office, or had the presidency in their future. The collections of Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History and Archives Division contain a plethora of presidential pictures spanning party lines and reaching back into the early twentieth century—many of which are available to view in the library’s online catalog.

The photos depicted in the following gallery are indicative of the unique materials found in the archival collections of Dallas Public Library. (Learn more by searching online in the catalog. Go to “Advanced” and use the “Limit By” option to select “Digital Archive” then type in your topic.)

Contact Dallas History & Archives Division at Dallas Public Library at (214) 670-1435 or email [email protected] with questions about the many fascinating photographic resources available.

Students in Texas learning about the Harlem Renaissance will read in their high school history textbooks that there were some critics who disparaged the output of the cultural movement. High school students in California will read in their history textbooks that there has been legislation passed over the years that restricts the right to bear arms laid out the second amendment to the Constitution, but that detail is omitted in the Texas version of the exact same textbook.

These are two of the discrepancies between high school textbooks that the New York Times found in an analysis of the books used in Texas and California schools. Their report shows how the highly political process that goes into approving textbooks for American schools can alter the way history is conveyed and interpreted. This isn’t news to anyone who has seen the great documentary The Revisionaries, which takes viewers behind the scenes in the ongoing ideological battles waged over how Texas textbooks are written. Still, the report details how children growing up in different parts of the country will emerge from high school with subtle, if significant differences in how they understand this country.

Here’s how it happens:

I was working on another story for D Magazine—on boxing gyms in Oak Cliff—when I heard of Campo Santo de Cemento Grande. Inside Casa Guanajuato’s boxing gym, among the murals of the Virgen de Guadalupe and idyllic landscapes serving as reminders of home, among the musty heavy bags hanging from the ceiling and faded photographs of old boxers inside cheap frames, there was a picture of Eladio R. Martinez. The Martinezes were one of the original Mexican families in Dallas, Tereso Ortiz, founder of Casa Guanajuato, told me. Around a year later, when I set out to write about them, Eladio’s youngest brother and last surviving sibling, Henry, had recently passed.

I first met Henry Jr. in the Jaycee Zaragoza Recreational Center. He invited me there to have breakfast. Homemade tortillas, refried beans, huevos con chorizo, pan dulce, coffee. Several times a week, anyone can eat a free breakfast there. It is, as Henry Jr. explained, part of the legacy his father left.

While we ate, I explained what I wanted to write. About his family and Campo Santo de Cemento Grande, the cemetery where Eladio lies beside his mother, sister, and uncle. I told him how through his family and that small graveyard, I wanted to tell part of the history of Dallas. About the laborers—Mexicans, in this case—who made cement, the literal substance that helped make Dallas into a modern city. It was dangerous, and at times deadly work. In some cases, the negative health effects did not appear until years later, after living around and breathing in those chemicals.

He agreed. He thanked me for keeping alive the memory of his community. And as he drove me around West Dallas and what once was Cement City, he spoke of what certain landmarks—some historical, others sentimental—meant to him and his family’s history. Campo Santo de Cemento Grande remains especially important. “Before my dad passed away, he said, ‘son, I just want to tell you one thing, take care of my family’s cemetery. That’s very, very important to me.”

It’s where Henry Sr. spent hours at a time. It’s where he wanted to get buried. It’s where his son, Henry Jr., still hopes to bury him. It’s where an unknown, or ignored, part of the area’s history is buried. It’s why I wrote about the Martinez family and the people like them who had—and continue to have—an important, difficult, and under-appreciated role in making Dallas what it is today.

Read it today. It is online now.