Robert Burns, Texan

This article situates Ann Rigney’s analysis of Burns centenary commemorations in antebellum Texas, where a Burns centenary commemoration took place in the important port city of Galveston. The Galveston commemoration comports with Rigney’s theory of collective memory formation in specific ‘social frames’. As the Galveston event suggests, in republican and pre-war American Texas, the collective memory of Burns underwrote a structure of local governance that, in the absence of state power, cultivated and relied on networks of political and economic power based largely on the common interests of businessmen and Freemasons.