For more information about Dick Dowling, you can browse all of the items in the Dick Dowling Digital Archive hosted on this site, or consult the much larger Dick Dowling Collection at the Houston Area Digital Archives, maintained by the Houston Public Library. To learn more about how this exhibit was made, you can read the course blogs for "HIST 246: The American Civil War Era," taught by Dr. Caleb McDaniel, in the Spring 2011 and Fall 2011 semesters.

The best modern study of the Battle of Sabine Pass is by Edward T. Cotham, Jr., Sabine Pass: The Confederacy's Thermopylae (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

To see how other past writers and historians have portrayed Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass, you can read brief excerpts and discussions of the work by the following authors, compiled by Rice undergraduate students in 2011:

For information about antebellum slavery in Texas and along the Gulf Coast, see Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), chapters 3-5 and 10-12; Earl Wesley Fornell, The Galveston Era: The Texas Crescent on the Eve of Secession (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961); The Texas Slavery Project, http://www.texasslaveryproject.org/; Randolph B. Campbell, "Slavery," The Handbook of Texas Online; Paul D. Lack, "Slavery, Urban," The Handbook of Texas Online.

For information about African Americans and the Union navy, see Joseph P. Reidy, "Black Men in Navy Blue During the Civil War," Prologue Magazine 33, no. 3 (Fall 2001), online version; Edward T. Cotham, Jr., ed., The Southern Journey of a Civil War Marine: The Illustrated Note-Book of Henry O. Gusley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

For information about Irish Americans in the South and Houston, see David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David Gleeson, "Another 'Lost Cause': The Irish in the South Remember the Confederacy," Southern Cultures (2011): 50-73.

For information about Civil War memory and commemoration, see Thomas J. Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Harvard University Press, 2005).

For other related exhibits online, see Under the Rebel Flag: Life in Texas During the Civil War by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission; the Sabine Pass Battleground State Historic Site; the Civil War section of Fear, Force, and Leather: The Texas Prison System's First Hundred Years, 1848-1948, by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission; and Texas in the Civil War by the Texas State Historical Commission.

Further Reading