he was honored by the university's College of Liberal Arts with its Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award. Cummins is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Books Cummins has written or edited ten books and numerous articles on the history of Texas, Louisiana, and the Southwestern United States. As a historian of the Spanish Borderlands, his research interests deal with the advance of the Anglo-American frontier into the Mississippi River valley, Spanish Louisiana, and Spanish colonial Texas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A Guide to the History of Louisiana (1982) A Guide to the History of Texas (1988) Texas: A Political History (1990) Spanish Observers and the American Revolution (1992) Louisiana: A History 4th Edition (2001) Austin College: A Sesquicentennial History (1999) United States History to 1877 (2006) Emily Austin of Texas, 1795-1851 (2009) Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas (2015) <ref>Cummins, Light Townsend, Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas, Texas A&M University Press, College Station TX 2015</ref> To the Vast and Beautiful Land: Anglo Migration into Spanish Louisiana and Texas, 1760s–1820s (2019) Further reading "Light T. Cummins," Contemporary Authors, Vol. 141 (Washington, D.C.: Gale Research Associate, 1994), pp. 98–99. "Biography of Light T. Cummins," Southwestern Historical Quarterly'', Vol 110, No. 1 (June 2006), 124-25. References External links Governor Perry Appoints Cummins Texas State Historian Cummins website Harper Collins author page Emily Austin book website Texas State Historian blog Works by and about Cummins at World Cat 21st-century American historians American male non-fiction writers Writers from San Antonio People from Sherman, Texas 1946 births Living people Place of birth missing (living people) San Antonio Academy alumni Austin College faculty Historians from Texas 21st-century American male writers