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Humanities Texas recently launched season three of Texas Originals, our radio program profiling individuals who have had a profound influence on Texas history and culture. Last month we tested your knowledge with the Texas Originals Quiz!

Readers who answered the most questions correctly were entered into a drawing to win a Humanities Texas prize package. Check your answers below to see how many you got correct!

Question One

Although he failed to find the mythical cities of Cíbola he was seeking, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado became the first European to lead an expedition into the Great Plains, where he and his party recorded encounters with American bison, Palo Duro Canyon, and the land that is now the Texas Panhandle.

Question Two

Alongside Lady Bird Johnson, the uproarious reporter, press secretary, public speaker, and legendary party host Liz Carpenter modernized the public image of women in politics.

Question Three

Artists Luis Jiménez, Allie Victoria Tennant, Robert Rauschenberg, and Dorothy Hood all earned recognition for their innovative methods, but only Luis Jiménez's sculpture—a larger-than-life mustang in signature bright blue fiberglass—now greets travelers at the Denver airport.

Question Four

Lucille Bishop Smith's inventive boxed cooking mix led to a lucrative deal with American Airlines and friendships with Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and boxer Joe Louis. Her great-grandsons opened a Houston restaurant in her honor in 2012.

Question Five

Many readers know him best for his novels that depict the American West; however, Larry McMurtry also received an Oscar for his coauthored screenplay for Brokeback Mountain.

Question Six

Nicknamed the "Lark of the Border," Tejana singer and guitarist Lydia Mendoza was the first Texan to be awarded the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 1982.

Question Seven

As one of Texas’s first Black legislators, Texas State Senator Matthew Gaines advocated for free, integrated public education and supported legislation that led to the creation of Texas A&M University.

Question Eight

Inducted into the Texas Newspaper Foundation Hall of Fame in 2001, Pulitzer Prize winning-journalist Caro Brown is best known for reporting on political corruption in Duval County.

Question Nine

Almost twenty years after becoming the first licensed African American architect in Texas, John Saunders Chase cofounded the National Organization of Minority Architects.

Question Ten

Educator Lillian Horace, now recognized as Texas’s first Black woman novelist, predicted the contemporary genre of Afrofuturism with her 1916 book Five Generations Hence.

Question Eleven

Artist Tex Avery, originally from Taylor, Texas, moved to California after high school to pursue his love of animation. There, he eventually earned a reputation as the "King of Cartoons" for his unique and unconventional characters.

Question Twelve

Although she never joined LULAC herself, Adela Sloss-Vento's collaboration with the organization was instrumental to the Mexican American civil rights movement, and she lent crucial support to the first class-action lawsuit to end school segregation in Texas.

Question Thirteen

Before serving as San Antonio's senator in the first Texas Congress, former Mexican Army officer José Francisco Ruiz was one of two native Texan signatories of the Texas Declaration of Independence.

Liz Carpenter. Courtesy Austin History Center.
Lucille B. Smith prepares fruit cakes to send to Tarrant County servicemen fighting in Vietnam, 1965. Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.
John Saunders Chase in a classroom on campus at UT Austin, 1950. UT Texas Student Publications Photographs, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.