The ninth largest city in the United States, Dallas is exceptional among American cities for the claims of its elites and boosters that it is a "city with no limits" and a "city with no history." Home to the Dallas Cowboys, self-styled as "America's Team," setting for the television series...

Texas has become the most American of all the states. Texas's politics has taken over in Washington, and Texas's passionate sense of itself as a nation is echoed by the fervent patriotism of tens of millions of Americans. Texas is also our most outsized hodgepodge -- of Latino, black, white, Asian;...