Dataset of OCR text from The Portal to Texas History and the Texas Digital Newspaper Program. This dataset includes titles from McKinney Texas from the years 1880 to 1936. Titles included in this dataset include: Collin County Mercury, McKinney Weekly Democrat-Gazette, The Daily Courier, The Daily Gazette, The Democrat, The Democrat-Gazette, The Lion Roar, The McKinney Advocate, The McKinney Examiner, The McKinney Gazette, The Semi-Weekly Courier, The Southern Jerseyite, and The Weekly Democrat-Gazette. In all there are 1,568 issues comprised of 12,975 pages of text.

This is a work of local history examining the course of Reconstruction in Collin County, Texas. National and state level surveys of Reconstruction often overlook the experiences of communities in favor of simpler, broader narratives. The work proceeds chronologically, beginning with the close of the Civil War, and tells the story of Collin County as national Reconstruction progressed and relies on works of professional and non-academic historians, oral histories, census data, and newspapers to present a coherent picture of local life, work, and politics. The results exemplify the value of local history, as local conditions influenced the course of events in Collin County as much as those in Austin and Washington D.C. The story of Reconstruction in Collin County is one of anomalous political views resulting from geographical exclusion from the cotton culture of Texas followed by a steady convergence. As Reconstruction progressed, Collin County began to show solidarity with more solidly conservative Texas Counties. The arrival of railroads allowed farmers to move from subsistence agriculture to cash crop production. This further altered local attitudes toward government, labor, voting rights, and education for Freedmen. By the end of Reconstruction, Collin County had all but abandoned their contrarian social and political …