Andrew J. Torget, historian and professor at the University of North Texas, will give a lecture based on his book, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s.