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Certificate of Commendation, American Association for State and Local History, 1994
T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award, Texas Historical Commission, 1992
San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 1993

Dramatic historical events have frequently provided subject matter for artists, particularly in pre-twentieth-century Texas, where works portraying historical, often legendary, events and individuals predominated. Until now, however, these paintings of Texas history have never received the kind of study given to historical, fictional, and film versions of the same events. Painting Texas History to 1900 fills this gap with an interdisciplinary approach that explores these paintings both as works of art and as historical documents.

The author examines the works of more than forty artists, including Henry McArdle, Theodore Gentilz, Robert Onderdonk, William Huddle, Frederic Remington, Friedrich Richard Petri, Arthur T. Lee, Seth Eastman, Sarah Hardinge, Frank Reaugh, W. G. M. Samuel, Carl G. von Iwonski, and Julius Stockfleth. He places each work within its historical and cultural context to show why such subject matter was chosen, why it was depicted in a particular way, and why such a depiction gained popular acceptance. For example, paintings of heroic events of the Texas Revolution were especially popular in the years following the Civil War, when, in Ratcliffe's view, Texans needed such images to assuage the loss of the war and the humiliation of Reconstruction.

Though the paintings cut across traditional art history categories—from the pictographs of early historic Indians to European-inspired oil paintings—they are bound together by their artists' intent for them to function as historically evocative documents. With their visual narratives of events that characterized all of America's westward expansion—Indian encounters, military battles, farming, ranching, surveying, and the closing of the frontier—these works add an important chapter to the story of the American West.

The metaphor “beyond the pale” refers to something that’s unacceptable and, as James M. Harding argues in this book, “almost always refers to something—an activity, an action, or an act—that is performed.” In this book, Harding recalls that historically the pale marked contested political boundaries and that what lay beyond the pale was considered to be a dangerous frontier. Siding with seemingly excessive and unreasonable acts and with the artists and activists who produce them, Harding brings together a series of ideas and performances that operate beyond the pale and asks readers to examine them on their own terms.

Drawing on political science, critical theory, and philosophy, Harding investigates instances of self-immolation, life-threatening journeys across deserts and seas, radical political hoaxes, extreme speech acts, and anti-police activism. The book’s five chapters consist of a series of meditations, each with an easily identifiable scholarly logic and clear argument, though the connections between the meditations are left up to the reader. Together these meditations urge readers to understand that “beyond the pale” acts are frequently the product of a sense of urgency that preempts the dictates of accepted reason, conventional logic, and safety.