Template talk:History of Texas navbox

Discussion on "topic" content

There was some discussion on the WikiProject page about the "By topic" section of this navbox. Maybe this bears some discussion to establish consensus?

My thinking was to include the "most significant" topics in Texas history, apart from the major periods and the histories of the individual towns. The list as of now (combined contributions of myself and others) is

• Annexation
• Indian Wars
• Jewish history
• Oil Boom
• Revolution
• Slavery
• Texas Ranger Division

If anybody has an opinion as to how to draw the line on scope please share. The concern, as Karanacs pointed out, is that without a definition of scope this entry could conceivably just grow to include any and all Texas-history-related articles.

--Mcorazao (talk) 17:38, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I've been turning a few ideas around in my head recently.

• Should we have a separate row in the table for military events? This would include the Texas Revolution, the Texas-Indian Wars, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War (duplicate link?), and possibly other events like the Fredonian Rebellion.
• In my ideal world, the topic row would include links that are specifically "history of X topic in Texas". This would preclude links like Annexation and Oil Boom. Unfortunately, we don't seem to have a lot of "history of X topic in Texas" articles right now.
• I'm considering creating Timeline of Texas, which would be good to link from something like this....That will need a lot of work, though.

Thanks for all your efforts! Karanacs (talk) 17:53, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

P.S. The reason I made the one link "Texas Ranger Division" was in case of confusion with the baseball team. It doesn't confuse me, but I don't know about non-Texans. Karanacs (talk) 17:53, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Regarding the overall organization of topics I could go a lot of different ways on it. Having a "military history" row is ok though I wonder if that implies something militaristic about the state (giving it a whole row to talk about war). I'm not sure what the right way to scope it is. I guess if I ignore which articles exist and think about what are major topics about Texas history that I would want to see in this row I might think of

• Revolution
• Slavery
• Annexation
• Native American history
• Immigration
• Pioneer culture (including the role Texans played in settling the West)
• Cattle economy
• Cotton economy
• Oil economy (Texas Oil Boom covers an important part of this history but there are other parts)
• Vice (may sound funny but, even aside from the Galveston Open Era, there is a lot of interesting history about gambling and prostitution in Texas from its founding until the mid 1900s)[1][2]
• High-tech (recent but still a significant historical trend which Texas played a key role in)[3][4]
• Politics (this history is some of the most fascinating [and scary] in the U.S.)

Whether anybody has the time to go develop all of those unwritten articles is another question.

Regarding the "Texas Rangers" thing ... I guess I look at that the same way as the fact that putting "Dallas" might lead somebody to think we are talking about the TV show (which many foreigners have seen). My thinking is that it is a navigational tool, not content, so even in the small chance they might make a mistake the worst that happens is they learn something new. --Mcorazao (talk) 21:29, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Images

I decided that I didn't like the height of the navbox when it is collapsed. I also thought it would be nice to include the 6 flags since this is a history navbox.

If anybody doesn't like what I've done please feel free to change.

--Mcorazao (talk) 21:54, 22 January 2010 (UTC)