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The Taft Ranch
A Texas Principality
By A. Ray Stephens
University of Texas Press, 1964

For fifty years the progressive Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company, popularly known as the Taft Ranch, led in the development of South Texas, and in the early twentieth century achieved national and international repute for its contributions to agriculture. The story of the ranch reaches its climax as the firm is absorbed into the community growing up around it—the same community the ranch had nurtured to an unprecedented prosperity.

In 1961 A. Ray Stephens visited Taft, Texas, and received permission to use the dust-covered records, which for thirty years had been closed to historians. These records, plus the valuable supplementary material in the Fulton Collection at the University of Texas, have enabled the author to tell the complete story of the ranch from its inception in 1880 to its dissolution in 1930.

In 1880, with a fifty-year charter, the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company was legally born as a private corporation. For the duration of its history this company aided the advancement of South Texas through effective utilization of the fertile land, through development of agriculture and related industries, and through encouragement of settlers and curious visitors to the Coastal Bend region. Its history is a long, determined fight against severe drought, cattle disease, and financial insolvency. Guided by farsighted men who believed in experimentation in agriculture—and who also promoted the establishment of stores, schools, colleges, churches, and industrial plants—the company not only survived but prospered, and by 1920 its owners could survey their vast properties with well-earned satisfaction. The struggling cattle firm of 1880 had expanded into a multi-interest, profitable corporation that had established and supervised most of the industries in Taft, Texas.

Stephens' well-documented 1964 study had been long needed. During the three decades preceding it, the ranch had been well-nigh forgotten; only the handful of people, then still living, who had worked on the ranch had kept its memory fresh, while the voluminous company records remained inaccessible. The author supplemented his study of company records and newspapers with archival material, government records, and information obtained during hours of interviewing. His book will insure for the Taft Ranch its deservedly prominent position in Texas history.

The lively introduction was written by Joe B. Frantz (1917–1993) who, in his role of Professor of History at the University of Texas, encouraged the study and watched its development.

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Tales of Canyonlands Cowboys
Richard Negri
Utah State University Press, 1997

Richard Negri interviews cattlemen and women about ranching in the rugged canyonlands region of southeastern Utah. Personal stories and anecdotes from the colorful characters who ground out a hard living on ranches of the are in the early twentieth century.

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The Texanist
Fine Advice on Living in Texas
By David Courtney and Jack Unruh
University of Texas Press, 2017

The Texanist, Texas Monthly’s perennially popular back-page column, has become the magazine’s most-read feature. With an inimitable style and an unassailable wholesomeness, columnist David Courtney has counseled many a well-intentioned Texan, native or wannabe, on how to properly conduct him- or herself. Until the July 2016 issue, an original illustration by the late award-winning artist Jack Unruh, depicting the Texanist in a situation described in the column, accompanied the Texanist’s sage wisdom. Unruh’s peerless illustrations displayed a sly wit that paired perfectly with Courtney’s humorous ripostes.

The Texanist gathers several dozen of Unruh’s most unforgettable illustrations, along with the fascinating, perplexing, and even downright weird questions that inspired them. Curing the curious, exorcizing bedevilment, and orienting the disoriented, the Texanist advises on such things as: Is it wrong to wear your football team’s jersey to church? When out at a dancehall, do you need to stick with the one that brung ya? Is it real Tex-Mex if it’s served with a side of black beans? Can one have too many Texas-themed tattoos? The Texanist addresses all of these important subjects and more. Whether you heed the good guidance, or just enjoy the whimsical illustrations, The Texanist will both entertain and educate you.

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Texas, A Modern History
Revised Edition
By David G. McComb
University of Texas Press, 2010

Since its publication in 1989, Texas, A Modern History has established itself as one of the most readable and reliable general histories of Texas. David McComb paints the panorama of Lone Star history from the earliest Indians to the present day with a vigorous brush that uses fact, anecdote, and humor to present a concise narrative. The book is designed to offer an adult reader the savor of Texan culture, an exploration of the ethos of its people, and a sense of the rhythm of its development. Spanish settlement, the Battle of the Alamo, the Civil War, cattle trails, oil discovery, the growth of cities, changes in politics, the Great Depression, World War II, recreation, economic expansion, and recession are each a part of the picture. Photographs and fascinating sidebars punctuate the text.

In this revised edition, McComb not only incorporates recent scholarship but also tracks the post–World War II rise of the Republican Party in Texas and the evolution of the state from rural to urban, with 88 percent of the people now living in cities. At the same time, he demonstrates that, despite many changes that have made Texas similar to the rest of the United States, much of its unique past remains.

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The Texas Book Two
More Profiles, History, and Reminiscences of the University
Edited by David Dettmer
University of Texas Press, 2012

In every corner of the sprawling enterprise that is the University of Texas at Austin, you will find teaching, research, artistic creation, and sports achievement that are among the best in the world. Mandated by the Texas constitution to be “a university of the first class,” UT Austin strives for excellence across the curriculum, from the most traditional of liberal arts disciplines to the cutting edge of science and technology. For Texans interested in progress, whether students of the university or members of the public, there are few pleasures greater than uncovering the intellectual treasures that can be found by exploring the university’s “Forty Acres” and all that they contain.

The Texas Book, edited by Richard A. Holland and published in 2006, offered the first in-depth exploration of UT’s history and traditions through a collection of profiles, histories, and reminiscences. Now The Texas Book Two continues the story, with a variety of contributors recalling particular events and personalities that have helped shape the university and the people whose lives it has touched. Twenty-one essays present personalities such as John A. Lomax, Anna Hiss, J. R. Parten, Harvey Penick, John W. Hargis, and Jorge Luis Borges; accounts of legislative battles and debates over campus architecture; histories of crown jewels such as the McDonald Observatory and Austin City Limits; and the reminiscences of Barbara Smith Conrad, Sam Hurt, and Cat Osterman, among others.

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Texas Crossings
The Lone Star State and the American Far West, 1836–1986
By Howard R. Lamar; foreword by Lewis L. Gould
University of Texas Press, 1991

“Texas is not a place, it is a commotion!” exclaimed one early visitor to the state, underscoring the mobility and “get-ahead” spirit that have always characterized Texas and its people. In these thought-provoking essays, Howard R. Lamar looks specifically at the “crossings” that have characterized Texas history to see what effect these migrations to and through Texas have had on Texas, the Southwest, and links between Texas and California.

Originally presented in 1986 at the University of Texas at Austin as the first George W. Littlefield Lectures in American History, these essays explore a previously neglected aspect of the western story: the influence of Texans—and other Southerners—on the character and history of the southwestern states. Lamar discusses the many efforts to establish overland trails, and later railroads, to California and how those efforts were fueled by the gold rush era of 1849–1850. He traces the influence of immigrant Texans and the flourishing southern community in California, particularly during the Civil War years. He follows the twentieth-century migration of “Okies,” whose desire to settle and resume their agricultural lifeways clashed with Californians’ preference for migrant workers. And he reveals how the discovery of oil, not only in Texas but also in California, western Canada, and Alaska, continues to link these regions.

Texas has always been a place that people pass through, going either east-west or north-south. Texas Crossings explains what brought the people to Texas and what they carried away with them to California and the West.

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Texas Furniture, Volume One
The Cabinetmakers and Their Work, 1840-1880, Revised edition
By Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren
University of Texas Press, 2012

The art of furniture making flourished in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. To document this rich heritage of locally made furniture, Miss Ima Hogg, the well-known philanthropist and collector of American decorative arts, enlisted Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren to research early Texas Furniture and its makers. They spent more than a decade working with museums and private collectors throughout the state to examine and photograph representative examples. They also combed census records, newspapers, and archives for information about cabinetmakers. These efforts resulted in the 1975 publication of Texas Furniture, which quickly became the authoritative reference on this subject.

Now updated with an expanded Index of Texas Cabinetmakers that includes information that has come to light since the original publication and corrects errors, Texas Furniture presents a catalog of more than two hundred pieces of furniture, each superbly photographed and accompanied by detailed descriptions of the piece’s maker, date, materials, measurements, history, and owner, as well as an analysis by the authors. The book also includes chapters on the material culture of nineteenth-century Texas and on the tools and techniques of nineteenth-century Texas cabinetmakers, with a special emphasis on the German immigrant cabinetmakers of the Hill Country and Central Texas. The index of Texas cabinetmakers contains biographical information on approximately nine hundred men who made furniture in Texas, and appendices list information on the state’s largest cabinet shops taken from the United States census records.

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Texas Furniture, Volume Two
The Cabinetmakers and Their Work, 1840–1880
By Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren
University of Texas Press, 2012

The art of furniture making flourished in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. To document this rich heritage of locally made furniture, Miss Ima Hogg, the well-known philanthropist and collector of American decorative arts, enlisted Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren to research early Texas furniture and its makers. After more than a decade of investigation, they published Texas Furniture in 1975, and it quickly became the authoritative reference on this subject. An updated edition, Texas Furniture, Volume One, was issued in the spring of 2012.

Texas Furniture, Volume Two presents over 150 additional pieces of furniture that were not included in Volume One, each superbly photographed in color and accompanied by detailed descriptions of the piece’s maker, date, materials, measurements, history, and owner, as well as an analysis by the authors. Taylor and Warren have also written a new introduction for this volume, in which they amplify the story of early Texas furniture. In particular, they compare and contrast the two important traditions of cabinetmaking in Texas, Anglo-American and German, and identify previously unknown artisans. The authors also discuss nineteenth-century Texans’ desire for refinement and gentility in furniture, non-commercial furniture making, and marquetry work. And they pay tribute to the twentieth-century collectors who first recognized the value of locally made Texas furniture and worked to preserve it. A checklist of Texas cabinetmakers, which contains biographical information on approximately nine hundred men who made furniture in Texas, completes the volume.

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Texas Gardening the Natural Way
The Complete Handbook
By Howard Garrett
University of Texas Press, 2004

Compost your old "complete" gardening guide. There's a new way of gardening in Texas that's healthier for people and the environment, more effective at growing vigorous plants and reducing pests, cheaper to maintain, and just more fun. It's Howard Garrett's "The Natural Way" organic gardening program, and it's all here in Texas Gardening the Natural Way.

This book is the first complete, state-of-the-art organic gardening handbook for Texas. Using Howard Garrett's new mainstream gardening techniques, Texas Gardening the Natural Way presents a total gardening program:

  • How to plan, plant, and maintain beautiful landscapes without using chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides.
  • Gardening fundamentals: soils, landscape design, planting techniques, and maintenance practices.
  • Includes more native and adaptable varieties of garden and landscape plants than any other guide on the market.
  • Trees: 134 species of evergreens, berry- and fruit-bearing, flowering, yellow fall color, orange fall color, and red fall color.
  • Shrubs and specialty plants: 85 species for sun, shade, spring flowering, summer flowering, and treeform shrubs.
  • Ground covers and vines: 51 species for sun and shade.
  • Annuals and perennials: 136 species for fall color, winter color, summer color in shade and sun, and spring color. Also seeding rates for wildflowers.
  • Lawn grasses: 10 species for sun and shade, with additional information on 16 native grasses, seeding rates for 32 grasses, and suggested mowing heights.
  • Fruits, nuts, and vegetables: 58 species, with a vegetable planting chart and information on organic pecan and fruit tree growing, fruit varieties for Texas, grape and pecan varieties, and gardening by the moon.
  • Common green manure crops: 29 crops that help enrich the soil.
  • Herbs: 66 species for culinary and medicinal uses.
  • Bugs: 73 types of helpful and harmful bugs, with organic remedies for pests, lists of beneficial bugs and plants that attract them, a beneficial bug release schedule, and sources for beneficial bugs.
  • Plant diseases: organic treatments for 55 common problems.
  • Organic methods for repelling mice, rabbits, armadillos, beavers, cats, squirrels, and deer.
  • Organic management practices: watering, fertilizing, controlling weeds, releasing beneficial insects, biological controls (including bats and purple martins), and recipes for Garrett Juice, fire ant control drench, vinegar herbicide, Sick Tree Treatment, and Tree Trunk Goop.
  • Average first and last freeze dates for locations around the state.
  • Organic fertilizers and soil amendments: 61 varieties, including full instructions for making compost.
  • Organic pest control products: 30 varieties.
  • Common house plants and poisonous plants.
  • Instructions for climbing vegetable structures and bat houses.
  • 833 gorgeous full-color photographs.
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Texas in the Confederacy
An Experiment in Nation Building
Clayton E. Jewett
University of Missouri Press, 2002
Historians examining the Confederacy have often assumed the existence of a monolithic South unified behind the politics and culture of slavery. In addition, they have argued for the emergence of a strong central state government in the Confederacy. In Texas in the Confederacy, Clayton E. Jewett challenges these assumptions by examining Texas politics, with an emphasis on the virtually neglected topic of the Texas legislature. In doing so, Jewett shows that an examination of state legislative activity during this period is essential to understanding Texas’s relationship with the Indian tribes, the states in the Trans-Mississippi Department, and the Confederate government.
Jewett explores the role of leadership and how statesmen understood and handled the apparent contradictions between the national interests of war and the need to protect property and individual liberty. He reveals that the dissemination of political power lay in the state legislature, where politicians united in an effort to protect commercial interests beyond the institution of slavery. This course of action resulted not only from Texas’s development of an identity separate from that of other southern states, but also from Confederate neglect of Texas. This in turn served to undermine the formation of central state authority and directly contributed to the defeat of a southern nation and the war effort.
By advancing the historiographical line of inquiry surrounding the critical issues of secession, military enlistment, cotton trading, economic production, and legislative support for state institutions, Texas in the Confederacy addresses the perennial question of why the South lost the Civil War. It also provides an essential step in changing the direction of inquiry toward a deeper understanding of nationhood and how the South functioned during the Civil War.
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The Texas Land and Development Company
A Panhandle Promotion, 1912-1956
By B. R. Brunson
University of Texas Press, 1970

Agricultural and urban development came late to the Texas South Plains, and frontier life lingered well into the twentieth century. In the decade preceding World War I numerous land companies flourished in the area and acted as catalysts for settlement and economic expansion. Prominent among these companies was the Plainview-based Texas Land and Development Company, founded in 1912 as an operating agent for a syndicate of eastern financiers.

Like most land companies, the Texas Land and Development Company operated a large-scale enterprise that broke up ranch holdings into tracts for sale to farmers. Company agents advertised broadly in newspapers and magazines and organized special train trips to bring prospective customers to the area. And, like most entrepreneurs associated with frontier land companies, backers of the Texas Land and Development Company hoped to realize a quick profit from land sales.

The Plainview enterprise was, however, unique in many ways. It promoted relatively high-priced lands and tried to sell fully developed, irrigated farms. The company was an important social and economic force in Plainview and the surrounding counties because its backers put capital into the region instead of taking money out. Especially during the early years, the company realized little profit from sales because of war and depression. The complex and sophisticated fiscal structure of the company is of particular historical significance.

B. R. Brunson traces the history of the influential Texas Land and Development Company from its inception in 1912 to its final dissolution in January 1956. He combines an analysis of the company's role in Panhandle economic growth with lively biographies of the men who organized the operation and descriptions of their achievements in the fields of irrigation, farm planning, company organization, and finance.

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Texas Lithographs
A Century of History in Images
Ron Tyler
University of Texas Press, 2023

2024 Kate Broocks Bates Award for Historical Research, Texas State Historical Association​
2024 TCU Texas Book Prize, Friends of the TCU Library and the TCU Press

A stunning and comprehensive collection of lithographs from 1818 to 1900 Texas.


Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from telegraphy to railroads. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture. One of the great subjects of the lithography boom was an emerging Euro-American colony in the Americas: Texas.

The most complete collection of its kind—and quite possibly the most complete visual record of nineteenth-century Texas, period—Texas Lithographs is a gateway to the history of the Lone Star State in its most formative period. Ron Tyler assembles works from 1818 to 1900, many created by outsiders and newcomers promoting investment and settlement in Texas. Whether they depict the early French colony of Champ d’Asile, the Republic of Texas, and the war with Mexico, or urban growth, frontier exploration, and the key figures of a nascent Euro-American empire, the images collected here reflect an Eden of opportunity—a fairy-tale dream that remains foundational to Texans’ sense of self and to the world’s sense of Texas.

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Texas Mexican Americans and Postwar Civil Rights
By Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez
University of Texas Press, 2015
After World War II, Mexican American veterans returned home to lead the civil rights struggles of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Many of their stories have been recorded by the Voces Oral History Project (formerly the U.S. Latino & Latina World War II Oral History Project), founded and directed by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism. In this volume, she draws upon the vast resources of the Voces Project, as well as archives in other parts of the country, to tell the stories of three little-known advancements in Mexican American civil rights. The first two stories recount local civil rights efforts that typified the grassroots activism of Mexican Americans across the Southwest. One records the successful effort led by parents to integrate the Alpine, Texas, public schools in 1969—fifteen years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate schools were inherently unconstitutional. The second describes how El Paso’s first Mexican American mayor, Raymond Telles, quietly challenged institutionalized racism to integrate the city’s police and fire departments, thus opening civil service employment to Mexican Americans. The final account provides the first history of the early days of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and its founder Pete Tijerina Jr. from MALDEF’s incorporation in San Antonio in 1968 until its move to San Francisco in 1972.
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Texas Place Names
By Edward Callary, with Jean K. Callary
University of Texas Press, 2020

Was Gasoline, Texas, named in honor of a gas station? Nope, but the name does honor the town’s original claim to fame: a gasoline-powered cotton gin. Is Paris, Texas, a reference to Paris, France? Yes: Thomas Poteet, who donated land for the town site, thought it would be an improvement over “Pin Hook,” the original name of the Lamar County seat. Ding Dong’s story has a nice ring to it; the name was derived from two store owners named Bell, who lived in Bell County, of course. Tracing the turning points, fascinating characters, and cultural crossroads that shaped Texas history, Texas Place Names provides the colorful stories behind these and more than three thousand other county, city, and community names.

Drawing on in-depth research to present the facts behind the folklore, linguist Edward Callary also clarifies pronunciations (it’s NAY-chis for Neches, referring to a Caddoan people whose name was attached to the Neches River during a Spanish expedition). A great resource for road trippers and historians alike, Texas Place Names alphabetically charts centuries of humanity through the enduring words (and, occasionally, the fateful spelling gaffes) left behind by men and women from all walks of life.

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Texas Sports
Unforgettable Stories for Every Day of the Year
By Chad S. Conine
University of Texas Press, 2017

When it comes to sports, Texas more than earns its bragging rights. The Lone Star State has produced championship teams and legendary athletes not only in football, baseball, and basketball, but in dozens of other sports as well. Texas Sports celebrates more than a century of achievements in a day-by-day record of the people and events—both unforgettable and little-known—that have made Texas a powerhouse in the world of sports.

Chad S. Conine packs a wealth of sports facts and stories into 366 days. He ranges from firsts such as UT’s first football game (an 1893 win against Dallas University Football Club) to peak moments such as Earl Campbell running through defenders, Nolan Ryan throwing heat past baffled batters, and Babe Didrickson Zaharias winning the Western Open golf championship for the fourth time. Conine covers more than twenty-five sports and all levels from high school to professional, reminding us that if Texas had never seen a pigskin or a backboard, its sports legacy would still be secure. With a winning combination of victories and heartbreaks, men’s and women’s sports, and all regions of the state, Texas Sports is a must-read for all sports fans and trivia buffs.

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The Texas Supreme Court
A Narrative History, 1836–1986
By James L. Haley
University of Texas Press, 2013

“Few people realize that in the area of law, Texas began its American journey far ahead of most of the rest of the country, far more enlightened on such subjects as women’s rights and the protection of debtors.” Thus James Haley begins this highly readable account of the Texas Supreme Court. The first book-length history of the Court published since 1917, it tells the story of the Texas Supreme Court from its origins in the Republic of Texas to the political and philosophical upheavals of the mid-1980s.

Using a lively narrative style rather than a legalistic approach, Haley describes the twists and turns of an evolving judiciary both empowered and constrained by its dual ties to Spanish civil law and English common law. He focuses on the personalities and judicial philosophies of those who served on the Supreme Court, as well as on the interplay between the Court’s rulings and the state’s unique history in such areas as slavery, women’s rights, land and water rights, the rise of the railroad and oil and gas industries, Prohibition, civil rights, and consumer protection. The book is illustrated with more than fifty historical photos, many from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It concludes with a detailed chronology of milestones in the Supreme Court’s history and a list, with appointment and election dates, of the more than 150 justices who have served on the Court since 1836.

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Texas Takes Wing
A Century of Flight in the Lone Star State
By Barbara Ganson
University of Texas Press, 2014

This book celebrates the aviators, astronauts, airline executives, and other innovators who have made Texas an influential world leader in the aerospace industry over the past century.

Tracing the hundred-year history of aviation in Texas, aviator and historian Barbara Ganson brings to life the colorful personalities that shaped the phenomenally successful development of this industry in the state. Weaving stories and profiles of aviators, designers, manufacturers, and those in related services, Texas Takes Wing covers the major trends that propelled Texas to the forefront of the field. Covering institutions from San Antonio’s Randolph Air Force Base (the West Point of this branch of service) to Brownsville’s airport with its Pan American Airlines instrument flight school (which served as an international gateway to Latin America as early as the 1920s) to Houston’s Johnson Space Center, home of Mission Control for the U.S. space program, the book provides an exhilarating timeline and engaging history of dozens of unsung pioneers as well as their more widely celebrated peers.

Drawn from personal interviews as well as major archives and the collections of several commercial airlines, including American, Southwest, Braniff, Pan American Airways, and Continental, this sweeping history captures the story of powered flight in Texas since 1910. With its generally favorable flying weather, flat terrain, and wide open spaces, Texas has more airports than any other state and is often considered one of America’s most aviation-friendly places. Texas Takes Wing also explores the men and women who made the region pivotal in military training, aircraft manufacturing during wartime, general aviation, and air servicing of the agricultural industry. The result is a soaring history that will delight aviators and passengers alike.

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Texas Through Women's Eyes
The Twentieth-Century Experience
By Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith
University of Texas Press, 2010

Winner, Liz Carpenter Award For Research in the History of Women, Texas State Historical Association, 2010

Texas women broke barriers throughout the twentieth century, winning the right to vote, expanding their access to higher education, entering new professions, participating fully in civic and political life, and planning their families. Yet these major achievements have hardly been recognized in histories of twentieth-century Texas. By contrast, Texas Through Women's Eyes offers a fascinating overview of women's experiences and achievements in the twentieth century, with an inclusive focus on rural women, working-class women, and women of color.

McArthur and Smith trace the history of Texas women through four eras. They discuss how women entered the public sphere to work for social reforms and the right to vote during the Progressive era (1900–1920); how they continued working for reform and social justice and for greater opportunities in education and the workforce during the Great Depression and World War II (1920–1945); how African American and Mexican American women fought for labor and civil rights while Anglo women laid the foundation for two-party politics during the postwar years (1945–1965); and how second-wave feminists (1965–2000) promoted diverse and sometimes competing goals, including passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive freedom, gender equity in sports, and the rise of the New Right and the Republican party.

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Texian Exodus
The Runaway Scrape and Its Enduring Legacy
Stephen L. Hardin
University of Texas Press, 2024

A narrative account of the evacuation of the Texians in 1836, which was redeemed by the defeat of the Mexican army and the creation of the Republic of Texas.

Two events in Texas history shine so brightly that they can be almost blinding: the stand at the Alamo and the redemption at San Jacinto, where General Sam Houston’s volunteers won the decisive battle of the Texas Revolution. But these milestones came amid a less obviously heroic episode now studiously forgotten—the refugee crisis known as the Runaway Scrape.

Propulsive, lyrical, and richly illustrated, Texian Exodus transports us to the frigid, sodden spring of 1836, when thousands of Texians—Anglo-American settlers—fled eastward for the United States in fear of Antonio López de Santa Anna’s advancing Mexican army. Leading Texas historian Stephen L. Hardin draws on the accounts of the runaways themselves to relate a tale of high stakes and great sorrow. While Houston tried to build a force that could defeat Santa Anna, the evacuees suffered incalculable pain and suffering. Yet dignity and community were not among the losses. If many of the stories are indeed tragic, the experience as a whole was no tragedy; survivors regarded the Runaway Scrape as their finest hour, an ordeal met with cooperation and courage. For Hardin, such qualities still define the Texas character. That it was forged in retreat as well in battle makes the Runaway Scrape essential Texas history.

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Thirty Years Into Yesterday
A History of Archaeology at Grasshopper Pueblo
Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey
University of Arizona Press, 2005
For thirty years, the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Grasshopper—a 500-room Mogollon pueblo located on what is today the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona—probed the past, taught scholars of international repute, and generated controversy. This book offers an extraordinary window into a changing American archaeology and three different research programs as they confronted the same pueblo ruin.

Like the enigmatic Mogollon culture it sought to explore and earlier University of Arizona field schools in the Forestdale Valley and at Point of Pines, Grasshopper research engendered decades of controversy that still lingers in the pages of professional journals. Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey, players in the controversy who are intimately familiar with the field school that ended in 1992, offer a historical account of this major archaeological project and the intellectual debates it fostered.

Thirty Years Into Yesterday charts the development of the Grasshopper program under three directors and through three periods dominated by distinct archaeological paradigms: culture history, processual archaeology, and behavioral archaeology. It examines the contributions made each season, the concepts and methods each paradigm used, and the successes and failures of each. The book transcends interests of southwestern archaeologists in demonstrating how the three archaeological paradigms reinterpreted Grasshopper, illustrating larger shifts in American archaeology as a whole. Such an opportunity will not come again, as funding constraints, ethical concerns, and other issues no doubt will preclude repeating the Grasshopper experience in our lifetimes.

Ultimately, Thirty Years Into Yesterday continues the telling of the Grasshopper story that was begun in the authors’ previous books. In telling the story of the archaeologists who recovered the material residue of past Mogollon lives and the place of the Western Apache people in their interpretations, Thirty Years Into Yesterday brings the story full circle to a stunning conclusion.
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A Thousand Deer
Four Generations of Hunting and the Hill Country
By Rick Bass
University of Texas Press, 2012

In November, countless families across Texas head out for the annual deer hunt, a ritual that spans generations, ethnicities, socioeconomics, and gender as perhaps no other cultural experience in the state. Rick Bass’s family has returned to the same hardscrabble piece of land in the Hill Country—“the Deer Pasture”—for more than seventy-five years. In A Thousand Deer, Bass walks the Deer Pasture again in memory and stories, tallying up what hunting there has taught him about our need for wildness and wilderness, about cycles in nature and in the life of a family, and particularly about how important it is for children to live in the natural world.

The arc of A Thousand Deer spans from Bass’s boyhood in the suburbs of Houston, where he searched for anything rank or fecund in the little oxbow swamps and pockets of woods along Buffalo Bayou, to his commitment to providing his children in Montana the same opportunity—a life afield—that his parents gave him in Texas. Inevitably this brings him back to the Deer Pasture and the passing of seasons and generations he has experienced there. Bass lyrically describes his own passage from young manhood, when the urge to hunt was something primal, to mature adulthood and the waning of the urge to take an animal, his commitment to the hunt evolving into a commitment to family and to the last wild places.

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Thursday Night Lights
The Story of Black High School Football in Texas
By Michael Hurd
University of Texas Press, 2019

At a time when “Friday night lights” shone only on white high school football games, African American teams across Texas burned up the gridiron on Wednesday and Thursday nights. The segregated high schools in the Prairie View Interscholastic League (the African American counterpart of the University Interscholastic League, which excluded black schools from membership until 1967) created an exciting brand of football that produced hundreds of outstanding players, many of whom became college All-Americans, All-Pros, and Pro Football Hall of Famers, including NFL greats such as “Mean” Joe Green (Temple Dunbar), Otis Taylor (Houston Worthing), Dick “Night Train” Lane (Austin Anderson), Ken Houston (Lufkin Dunbar), and Bubba Smith (Beaumont Charlton-Pollard).

Thursday Night Lights tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of African American high school football in Texas. Drawing on interviews, newspaper stories, and memorabilia, Michael Hurd introduces the players, coaches, schools, and towns where African Americans built powerhouse football programs under the PVIL leadership. He covers fifty years (1920–1970) of high school football history, including championship seasons and legendary rivalries such as the annual Turkey Day Classic game between Houston schools Jack Yates and Phillis Wheatley, which drew standing-room-only crowds of up to 40,000, making it the largest prep sports event in postwar America. In telling this story, Hurd explains why the PVIL was necessary, traces its development, and shows how football offered a potent source of pride and ambition in the black community, helping black kids succeed both athletically and educationally in a racist society.

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front cover of Trails to Tiburón
Trails to Tiburón
The 1894 and 1895 Field Diaries of W J McGee
W. J. McGee; Transcribed by Hazel McFeely Fontana; Annotated and with an Introduction by Bernard L. Fontana
University of Arizona Press, 2000
When William John McGee set out from Washington, D.C., for the Sonoran Desert in 1894, he was inspired by a passion for adventure as much as a thirst for knowledge. McGee lived in an era when discovery was made through travel rather than study, and reputations were forged by going where no outsiders had gone before.

A self-taught scientist in the newly forming field of anthropology, McGee led two expeditions through southern Arizona and northern Sonora for the Bureau of American Ethnology. There he conducted ethnographic research among the Papagos (Tohono O'odham) and the Seris, and his subsequent publication The Seri Indians helped secure his place in the anthropological community.

McGee's complete journals of the expeditions, kept in small field notebooks and preserved in the Library of Congress, are published here for the first time. These journals contain detailed descriptions of the country and people McGee encountered and convey the adventure of traveling through wild and unfamiliar places—including a voyage to Isla Tiburón, or Shark Island, in the Gulf of California—and being plagued by foul weather, a shortage of supplies, and fear of attack from hostile Indians.

Trails to Tiburón features 57 historical photographs taken on the expedition, capturing the places McGee saw and the people he encountered. Fontana's notes to the diary provide useful botanical, geological, and ethnographic information, while his introduction places McGee and his field work in the context of late-nineteenth-century anthropology and science.

Trails to Tiburón reveals McGee's versatility as a field worker and shows his methods, often questioned today, to be the reasonable response of a man caught up in the intellectual fervor of his time. For anyone wanting to share in the spirit of adventure, these journals are a landmark in the annals of exploration.
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The Trials of Eroy Brown
The Murder Case That Shook the Texas Prison System
By Michael Berryhill
University of Texas Press, 2011

In April 1981, two white Texas prison officials died at the hands of a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville. Warden Wallace Pack and farm manager Billy Moore were the highest-ranking Texas prison officials ever to die in the line of duty. The warden was drowned face down in a ditch. The farm manager was shot once in the head with the warden's gun. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered meekly, claiming self-defense.

In any other era of Texas prison history, Brown's fate would have seemed certain: execution. But in 1980, federal judge William Wayne Justice had issued a sweeping civil rights ruling in which he found that prison officials had systematically and often brutally violated the rights of Texas inmates. In the light of that landmark prison civil rights case, Ruiz v. Estelle, Brown had a chance of being believed.

The Trials of Eroy Brown, the first book devoted to Brown's astonishing defense, is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown's three trials, which ended in his acquittal. Michael Berryhill presents Brown's story in his own words, set against the backdrop of the chilling plantation mentality of Texas prisons. Brown's attorneys—Craig Washington, Bill Habern, and Tim Sloan—undertook heroic strategies to defend him, even when the state refused to pay their fees. The Trials of Eroy Brown tells a landmark story of prison civil rights and the collapse of Jim Crow justice in Texas.

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front cover of Turn Out the Lights
Turn Out the Lights
Chronicles of Texas during the 80s and 90s
By Gary Cartwright
University of Texas Press, 2000

Whether the subject is Jack Ruby, Willie Nelson, or his own leukemia-stricken son Mark, when it comes to looking at the world through another person's eyes, nobody does it better than Gary Cartwright. For over twenty-five years, readers of Texas Monthly have relied on Cartwright to tell the stories behind the headlines with pull-no-punches honesty and wry humor. His reporting has told us not just what's happened over three decades in Texas, but, more importantly, what we've become as a result.

This book collects seventeen of Cartwright's best Texas Monthly articles from the 1980s and 1990s, along with a new essay, "My Most Unforgettable Year," about the lasting legacy of the Kennedy assassination. He ranges widely in these pieces, from the reasons for his return to Texas after a New Mexican exile to profiles of Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. Along the way, he strolls through San Antonio's historic King William District; attends a Dallas Cowboys old-timers reunion and the Holyfield vs. Foreman fight; visits the front lines of Texas' new range wars; gets inside the heads of murderers, gamblers, and revolutionaries; and debunks Viagra miracles, psychic surgery, and Kennedy conspiracy theories. In Cartwright's words, these pieces all record "the renewal of my Texas-ness, a rediscovery of Texas after returning home."

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front cover of Twelve Hundred Miles by Horse and Burro
Twelve Hundred Miles by Horse and Burro
J. Stokley Ligon and New Mexico’s First Breeding Bird Survey
Harley G. Shaw and Mara E. Weisenberger
University of Arizona Press, 2011
J. Stokley Ligon's work in bird conservation, habitat protection, and wildlife legislation during the mid-twentieth century is well-documented in his own writing and the writing of others. But hovering in the background of Ligon's life story has always been the rumor of a trip he made alone as a young man in 1913 in which he covered much of New Mexico alone on horseback. Details of the trip had faded into history, and Ligon—a self-effacing man—had never published the story.

As it turns out, the trek was Ligon's first job with the US Biological Survey, and it did not go entirely undocumented. The breeding bird population report that eventually resulted from the journey, photographs from glass plate negatives, and—perhaps most enticingly—Ligon's own personal diary from these travels are presented here. Not just a compelling account of the expedition itself, the materials and insights found in this volume also reveal aspects of Ligon's family history, his early interest in wildlife, and the development of the wilderness skills needed to undertake such a survey.

Using his original itinerary and handwritten report, the authors of this book revisited many of the places that Ligon surveyed and in a few cases were even able to locate and repeat Ligon's early photographs. Combined with a discussion of the conditions of birds and other wildlife then and now, this volume serves as a useful tool for understanding how wildlife numbers, distribution, and habitats changed in New Mexico over the course of the twentieth century.

Birding enthusiasts, historians, naturalists, and even armchair adventurers will all find something to love in this chronicle of a young man from a West Texas ranching family with a driving ambition to be a professional naturalist and writer.
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front cover of Twenty-one Texas Short Stories
Twenty-one Texas Short Stories
Edited by William Peery
University of Texas Press, 1954

This is a splendid collection of stories about Texas by Texans—stories that appeared in leading magazines in the first half of the twentieth century.

Authors in this volume:

  • Dillon Anderson
  • Barry Benefield
  • Charles Carver
  • Margaret Cousins
  • Chester T. Crowell
  • Eugene Cunningham
  • J. Frank Dobie
  • Fred Gipson
  • William Goyen
  • O. Henry
  • Sylvan Karchmer
  • Harry Kidd, Jr.
  • Mary King O’Donnell
  • George Pattullo
  • George Sessions Perry
  • Katherine Anne Porter
  • Winifred Sanford
  • John W. Thomason, Jr.
  • Thomas Thompson
  • John Watson
  • John W. Wilson
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