Lubbock began with water. Yellow House Draw and Blackwater Draw converge here, creating the headwaters of the North Fork Double Mountain Fork Brazos River. In March 1877, during the Buffalo Hunters' War, the Battle of Yellow House Canyon took place at what is now Mackenzie Park. George Singer built a trading post near the springs in 1881, serving cattle ranchers and military patrols along two crossing trails. Two rival towns, Old Lubbock and Monterey, merged in 1891 to form modern Lubbock, named for Thomas Saltus Lubbock, a Texas Ranger and Confederate officer. The railroad arrived in 1909, cotton cultivation expanded across the surrounding plains, and by 1923 the state legislature established Texas Technological College on the city's western edge. That institution would define Lubbock as much as cotton ever did.

Texas Tech University now enrolls over 40,000 students and employs thousands more. A study by the Rawls College of Business found that students, faculty, and staff contribute roughly $1.5 billion to the local economy annually, with student spending alone accounting for nearly $300 million. The university houses an undergraduate college, a law school, and a medical school on the same campus, one of only two Texas institutions to do so. Texas Tech's Red Raiders football program has captured 12 conference titles and appeared in over 40 bowl games. The men's basketball team reached the NCAA Final Four in 2019, and the women's team won the national championship in 1993 behind future WNBA legend Sheryl Swoopes. Beyond athletics, Texas Tech Press publishes scholarly works on the American West, and the Southwest Collection archives the region's history for researchers worldwide.

Charles Hardin Holley was born here in 1936 and grew up in a house on the edge of downtown. By his early twenties, he had revolutionized popular music, pioneering the standard rock band lineup and writing songs that influenced the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and generations that followed. His career lasted barely two years before a plane crash in Iowa on February 3, 1959, killed him, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, a date Don McLean would immortalize as the Day the Music Died. Lubbock named a music center for Holly and created the West Texas Walk of Fame in the historic Depot District. Mac Davis, another Lubbock native, wrote hits for Elvis Presley before launching his own career. The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, an outsider artist who influenced David Bowie, got his start playing free shows in local parking lots. Music runs through this city like the wind through cotton stalks.

A 2005 study by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research ranked Lubbock the second-most conservative city in America among municipalities over 100,000 in population. Christianity dominates the religious landscape, with Baptists leading, followed by Catholics and Methodists. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints dedicated a temple here in 2002 to serve West Texas, the Panhandle, and adjacent parts of New Mexico. Islam is the second-largest faith group. Beyond faith, Lubbock embraces its ranching heritage at the National Ranching Heritage Center and celebrates cowboy culture at the annual National Cowboy Symposium. The American Wind Power Center in Mackenzie Park houses over 100 historic windmills, monuments to the technology that made settlement possible on these dry plains.

From above, Lubbock spreads across the flat Llano Estacado in a grid pattern characteristic of High Plains cities, interrupted only by the meandering green corridor of Mackenzie Park and the canyon lands along Yellow House Draw. Texas Tech's campus is visible in the west, a cluster of Spanish Renaissance buildings surrounding a large football stadium. Loop 289 encircles the metropolitan area, with Interstate 27 running north toward Amarillo. Lubbock Preston Smith International Airport sits on the northeast side, the eighth-busiest in Texas and a major FedEx feeder hub. Cotton fields extend to the horizon in every direction, punctuated by the circular patterns of center-pivot irrigation systems that have transformed the South Plains into one of America's most productive agricultural regions.