My Copy: 9781585441662 (image from Brazoria County Historical Museum online)

I gotta admit, other than the fact that it was a museum-trip impulse buy, I’m not entirely sure why I picked this book up a few years ago, though I did thumb through it for some visuals a couple of times.

Hey, I’m a history nerd and like the museum–picking this baby up was kind of a no-brainer. And the price was WAY marked down.

Texas Flags has quite the collection of flags that’ve shown up in Texas history with a great deal of history to go with them. Now, many flags didn’t survive or couldn’t be preserved to survive, so the authors got an illustrator to re-create the flags digitally. Having most of the first part of the book with stark, digital flags was a little distracting. I liked seeing some of the original flags and what went into them.

The difficulty is as the book goes on, especially in the Civil War chapters, the flags described in the text aren’t there to be seen. I had to flip back and forth to the end of the book.

That part of the book really dragged it down. This is the person, this is the flag description, this is where it went, and then that’s it. When each regiment and company and all have their own flags, that’s a lot of info dropping without a photo to reflect on or context.

If it were organized a bit better, I could’ve appreciated it more…but I grew bored trying to figure out what the heck they were talking about. For example, I’ve always heard of the Confederate flag we’re used to being called the “stars and bars,” but darn near every flag was referred to that way, it seems.

Very confusing, and though there was some good info to go with it, I got tired of keeping up and wanted to finish it.

Not my cup of tea exactly, but then again, it could be yours.

(from WhereTexasBecameTexas.org)