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Accidental Activists
Mark Phariss, Vic Holmes, and Their Fight for Marriage Equality in Texas
David Collins
University of North Texas Press, 2017

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Acting Up and Getting Down
Plays by African American Texans
By Sandra M. Mayo and Elvin Holt
University of Texas Press, 2014

One of the few books of its kind, Acting Up and Getting Down brings together seven African American literary voices that all have a connection to the Lone Star state. Covering Texas themes and universal ones, this collection showcases often-overlooked literary talents to bring to life inspiring facets of black theatre history.

Capturing the intensity of racial violence in Texas, from the Battle of San Jacinto to a World War I–era riot at a Houston training ground, Celeste Bedford Walker’s Camp Logan and Ted Shine’s Ancestors provide fascinating narratives through the lens of history. Thomas Meloncon’s Johnny B. Goode and George Hawkins’s Br’er Rabbit explore the cultural legacies of blues music and folktales. Three unflinching dramas (Sterling Houston’s Driving Wheel, Eugene Lee’s Killingsworth, and Elizabeth Brown-Guillory’s When the Ancestors Call) examine homosexuality, a death in the family, and child abuse, bringing to light the private tensions of intersections between the individual and the community.

Supplemented by a chronology of black literary milestones as well as a playwrights’ canon, Acting Up and Getting Down puts the spotlight on creative achievements that have for too long been excluded from Texas letters. The resulting anthology not only provides new insight into a regional experience but also completes the American story as told onstage.

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Adolphe Gouhenant
French Revolutionary, Utopian Leader, and Texas Frontier Photographer
Paula Selzer
University of North Texas Press, 2019

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Agent of Change
Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist
By Cynthia E. Orozco
University of Texas Press, 2020

Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women, Texas State Historical Association

The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901–1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento’s achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader.

Bringing to light the economic and political transformations that swept through South Texas in the 1920s as ranching declined and agribusiness proliferated, Cynthia E. Orozco situates Sloss-Vento’s early years within the context of the Jim Crow/Juan Crow era. Recounting Sloss-Vento’s rise to prominence as a public intellectual, Orozco highlights a partnership with Alonso S. Perales, the principal founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Agent of Change explores such contradictions as Sloss-Vento’s tolerance of LULAC’s gender-segregated chapters, even though the activist was an outspoken critic of male privilege in the home and a decidedly progressive wife and mother. Inspiring and illuminating, this is a complete portrait of a savvy, brazen critic who demanded reform on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

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Albert A. Peña Jr.
Dean of Chicano Politics
José Angel Gutiérrez
Michigan State University Press, 2017
The political and social impact that Albert A. Peña Jr. had on the lives of Mexican Americans, and later Chicanos, is by all counts immeasurable. However, in part because Chicano biography has traditionally been a neglected research area among academics generally and Chicano Studies scholars specifically, his life’s work has not featured prominently in any biographical work to date, making this volume the first of its kind. It provides a richly detailed documentation of Peña’s life and career, from blue collar worker to judge and essay writer, spanning nearly ninety years. Readers will find that at the heart of his story is a focus on grassroots organizing and politics, sharing leadership, and a commitment to social justice.
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Alexander Watkins Terrell
Civil War Soldier, Texas Lawmaker, American Diplomat
By Lewis L. Gould
University of Texas Press, 2004

Alexander Terrell's career placed him at the center of some of the most pivotal events in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history, ranging from the Civil War to Emperor Maximilian's reign over Mexico and an Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Alexander Watkins Terrell at last provides the first complete biographical portrait of this complex figure.

Born in Virginia in 1827, Terrell moved to Texas in 1852, rising to the rank of Confederate brigadier general when the Civil War erupted. Afterwards, he briefly served in Maximilian's army before returning to Texas, where he was elected to four terms in the state Senate and three terms in the House. President Grover Cleveland appointed him minister to the Ottoman Empire, dispatching him to Turkey and the Middle East for four years while the issues surrounding the existence of Christians in a Muslim empire stoked violent confrontations there. His other accomplishments included writing legislation that created the Texas Railroad Commission and what became the Permanent University Fund (the cornerstone of the University of Texas's multibillion-dollar endowment).

In this balanced exploration of Terrell's life, Gould also examines Terrell's views on race, the impact of the charges of cowardice in the Civil War that dogged him, and his spiritual searching beyond the established religions of his time. In his rich and varied life, Alexander Watkins Terrell experienced aspects of nineteenth-century Texas and American history whose effects have continued down to the present day.

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All Over the Map
True Heroes of Texas Music
Michael Corcoran
University of North Texas Press, 2017

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All Over the Map
True Heroes of Texas Music
By Michael Corcoran
University of Texas Press, 2005

From country and blues to rap and punk, Texas music is all over the map, figuratively and literally. Texas musicians have pioneered new musical genres, instruments, and playing styles, proving themselves to be daring innovators who often call the tune for musicians around the country and even abroad. To introduce some of these trailblazing Texas musicians to a wider audience and pay tribute to their accomplishments, Michael Corcoran profiles thirty-two of them in All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music.

Corcoran covers musicians who work in a wide range of musical genres, including blues, gospel, country, rap, indie rock, pop, Cajun, Tejano, conjunto, funk, honky-tonk, rockabilly, rhythm and blues, and Western swing. His focus is on underappreciated artists, pioneers who haven't fully received their due. He also includes well-known musicians who've been underrated, such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Selena, and invites us to take a closer look at the unique talents of these artists. Corcoran's profiles come from articles he wrote for the Dallas Morning News, Austin American-Statesman, Houston Press, and other publications, which have been expanded and updated for this volume. His musical detective work even uncovers a case of mistaken identity (Washington Phillips) and corrects much misinformation on Blind Willie Johnson and Arizona Dranes. Corcoran closes the book with lively pieces on the Austin music scene and its most famous, if no longer extant, clubs, as well as his personal lists of the forty greatest Texas songs of all time and the twenty-five essential CDs for Texas music fans.

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All That Rises
A Novel
Alma García
University of Arizona Press, 2023
In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style.

What follows is a story in which mysteries are unraveled, odd alliances are forged, and the boundaries between lives blur in destiny-changing ways—all in a place where the physical border between two countries is as palpable as it is porous, and the legacies of history are never far away. There are no easy solutions to the issues the characters face in this story, and their various realities—as undocumented workers, Border Patrol agents, the American supervisor of a Mexican factory employing an impoverished workforce—never play out against a black-and-white moral canvas. Instead, they are complex human beings with sometimes messy lives who struggle to create a place for themselves in a part of the world like no other, even as they are forced to confront the lives they have made.

All That Rises is about secrets, lies, border politics, and discovering where you belong—within a family, as well as in the world beyond. It is a novel for the times we live in, set in a place many people know only from the news.
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Along the Texas Forts Trail
B. W. Aston
University of North Texas Press, 1997

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The Amazing Tale of Mr. Herbert and His Fabulous Alpine Cowboys Baseball Club
An Illustrated History of the Best Little Semipro Baseball Team in Texas
By DJ Stout
University of Texas Press, 2010

Back in the 1940s and 1950s, almost every small town in America had a baseball team. Most players were simply local heroes with a local following, but a few teams achieved fame far beyond their region. The Alpine Cowboys—despite being based in Texas's remote, sparsely populated Big Bend country—became a star in the firmament of semi-pro baseball. Lavishly underwritten by a wealthy rancher with a passion not only for baseball but even more for helping young men get a good start in life, the Cowboys played on a "field of dreams" whose facilities rivaled those of professional ballparks. Many Cowboys went on to play in the big leagues, and several pro teams, including the Pittsburgh Pirates, Chicago White Sox, and St. Louis Browns, came to play exhibition games at Kokernot Field.

The story of Herbert Kokernot Jr. and his Alpine Cowboys is a legend among baseball aficionados, but until now it has never been the subject of a book. DJ Stout, son of former Cowboys player Doyle Stout, presents a hall-of-fame-worthy collection of photographs, memorabilia, and reminiscences from Alpine Cowboys players, family members, and fans to capture fifteen years (1946–1961) of baseball at its finest. Nicholas Dawidoff's introduction, originally published in Sports Illustrated, tells the fascinating tale of "Mr. Herbert" and his determination to build a baseball team and ballpark that deserved to carry his ranch's 06 brand.

One of the most heartwarming episodes in the annals of the game, The Amazing Tale of Mr. Herbert and His Fabulous Alpine Cowboys is a fitting tribute to a man, a team, and a ballpark.

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Americo Paredes
In His Own Words, an Authorized Biography
Manuel F. Medrano
University of North Texas Press, 2010

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And Other Neighborly Names
Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore
Edited by Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams
University of Texas Press, 1981

"And Other Neighborly Names"—the title is from a study by Americo Paredes of the names, complimentary and otherwise, exchanged across cultural boundaries by Anglos and Mexicans—is a collection of essays devoted to various aspects of folk tradition in Texas. The approach builds on the work of the folklorists who have helped give the study of folklore in Texas such high standing in the field-Mody Boatright, J. Frank Dobie, John Mason Brewer, the Lomaxes, and of course Paredes himself, to whom this book is dedicated.

Focusing on the ways in which traditions arise and are maintained where diverse peoples come together, the editors and other essayists—John Holmes McDowell, Joe Graham, Alicia María González, Beverly J. Stoeltje, Archie Green, José E. Limón, Thomas A. Green, Rosan A. Jordan, Patrick B. Mullen, and Manuel H. Peña—examine conjunto music, the corrido, Gulf fishermen's stories, rodeo traditions, dog trading and dog-trading tales, Mexican bakers' lore, Austin's "cosmic cowboy" scene, and other fascinating aspects of folklore in Texas. Their emphasis is on the creative reaction to socially and culturally pluralistic situations, and in this they represent a distinctively Texan way of studying folklore, especially as illustrated in the performance-centered approach of Paredes, Boatright, and others who taught at the University of Texas at Austin. As an overview of this approach—its past, present, and future—"And Other Neighborly Names" makes a valuable contribution both to Texas folklore and to the discipline as a whole.

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Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986
By David Montejano
University of Texas Press, 1987

Winner, Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization Of American Historians, 1988
American Historical Association, Pacific Branch Book Award, 1989
Texas Institute of Letters Friends Of The Dallas Public Library Award, 1987
Texas Historical Commission T. R. Fehrenbach Award, Best Ethnic, Minority, And Women's History Publication, 1987

A major work on the history of Mexicans in Texas and the relations between Mexicans and Anglos.
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Another Year Finds Me in Texas
The Civil War Diary of Lucy Pier Stevens
By Vicki Adams Tongate
University of Texas Press, 2016

Lucy Pier Stevens, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Ohio, began a visit to her aunt’s family near Bellville, Texas, on Christmas Day, 1859. Little did she know how drastically her life would change on April 4, 1861, when the outbreak of the Civil War made returning home impossible. Stranded in enemy territory for the duration of the war, how would she reconcile her Northern upbringing with the Southern sentiments surrounding her?

Lucy Stevens’s diary—one of few women’s diaries from Civil War–era Texas and the only one written by a Northerner—offers a unique perspective on daily life at the fringes of America’s bloodiest conflict. An articulate, educated, and keen observer, Stevens took note seemingly of everything—the weather, illnesses, food shortages, parties, church attendance, chores, schools, childbirth, death, the family’s slaves, and political and military news. As she confided her private thoughts to her journal, she unwittingly revealed how her love for her Texas family and the Confederate soldier boys she came to care for blurred her loyalties, even as she continued to long for her home in Ohio. Showing how the ties of heritage, kinship, friendship, and community transcended the sharpest division in US history, this rare diary and Vicki Adams Tongate’s insightful historical commentary on it provide a trove of information on women’s history, Texas history, and Civil War history.

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Anson Jones
The Last President of Texas
By Herbert Gambrell
University of Texas Press, 1964

This is the story of a New Englander who came penniless to Mexican Texas in 1833 and within the next decade helped to bring his adopted country through the turbulent disorders of settlement, revolution, political experimentation, and statehood.

Within a year of his arrival, Anson Jones was successfully practicing medicine, acquiring land, and resolving to avoid politics; but then the Revolution erupted and Jones became a private in the Texas Army, doubling as surgeon at San Jacinto. Military duty done, he resumed medical practice but some acts of the First Congress so irked him that he became a member of the Second and began a political career that lasted from 1837 to 1846 during which he served successively as congressman, minister to the United States, Texas senator, secretary of state, and president of the Republic of Texas. Anson Jones took his own life on January 9, 1858.

Told with imagination and insight, Herbert Gambrell's account of the life of Anson Jones is also a colorful and concurrent biography of Texas and its people.

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Antebellum Jefferson, Texas
Everyday Life in an East Texas Town
Jacques D. Bagur
University of North Texas Press, 2012

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An Appeal to Justice
Litigated Reform of Texas Prisons
By Ben M. Crouch and James W. Marquart
University of Texas Press, 1989

How does a prison achieve institutional order while safeguarding prisoners' rights? Since the early 1960s, prison reform advocates have aggressively used the courts to extend rights and improve life for inmates, while prison administrators have been slow to alter the status quo. Litigated reform has been the most significant force in obtaining change.

An Appeal to Justice is a critical tudy of how the Texas Department of Corrections was transformed by Ruiz v. Estelle, the most sweeping class-action suit in correctional law history. Orders from federal judge William W. Justice rapidly moved the Texas system from one of the most autonomous, isolated, and paternalistic system to a more constitutional bureaucracy. In many respects the Texas experience is a microcosm of the transformation of American corrections over the second half of the twentieth century.

This is a careful account of TDC's fearful past as a plantation system, its tumultuous litigated reform, and its subsequent efforts to balance prisoner rights and prison order. Of major importance is the detailed examination of the broad stages of the reform process (and its costs and benefits) and an intimate look at prison brutality and humanity. The authors examine the terror tactics of the inmate guards, the development of prisoner gangs and widespread violence during the reforms, and the stability that eventually emerged. They also detail the change of the guard force from a relatively small, cohesive cadre dependent on discretion, personal loyalty, and physical dominance to a larger and more fragmented security staff controlled by formal procedures.

Drawing on years of research in archival sources and on hundreds of interviews with prisoners, administrators, and staff, An Appeal to Justice is a unique basis for assessing the course and consequences of prison litigation and will be valuable reading for legislators, lawyers, judges, prison administrators, and concerned citizens, as well as prison and public policy scholars.

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Architecture in Texas
1895-1945
By Jay C. Henry
University of Texas Press, 1993

Texas architecture of the twentieth century encompasses a wide range of building styles, from an internationally inspired modernism to the Spanish Colonial Revival that recalls Texas' earliest European heritage. This book is the first comprehensive survey of Texas architecture of the first half of the twentieth century.

More than just a catalog of buildings and styles, the book is a social history of Texas architecture. Jay C. Henry discusses and illustrates buildings from around the state, drawing a majority of his examples from the ten to twelve largest cities and from the work of major architects and firms, including C. H. Page and Brother, Trost and Trost, Lang and Witchell, Sanguinet and Staats, Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres, David Williams, and O'Neil Ford. The majority of buildings he considers are public ones, but a separate chapter traces the evolution of private housing from late-Victorian styles through the regional and international modernism of the 1930s. Nearly 400 black-and-white photographs complement the text.

Written to be accessible to general readers interested in architecture, as well as to architectural professionals, this work shows how Texas both participated in and differed from prevailing American architectural traditions.

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Armadillos to Ziziphus
A Naturalist in the Texas Hill Country
David M. Hillis, foreword by Harry W. Greene
University of Texas Press, 2023

A collection of essays on the ecology, biodiversity, and restoration of the Texas Hill Country.

For most of five decades, evolutionary biologist David Hillis has studied the biodiversity of the Texas Hill Country. Since the 1990s, he has worked to restore the natural beauty and diversity of his Mason County ranch, the Double Helix. In his excursions around his ranch and across the Edwards Plateau, Hillis came to realize how little most people know about the plants and animals around them or their importance to our everyday lives. He began thinking about how natural history is connected to our enjoyment of life, especially in a place as beautiful and beloved as the Hill Country, which, not coincidentally, happens to be one of the most biodiverse parts of Texas.

Featuring short nontechnical essays accompanied by vivid color photos, Armadillos to Ziziphus is a charming and casual introduction to the environment of the region. Whether walking the pasture with his Longhorn cattle, explaining the ecological significance of microscopic organisms in springtime mud puddles, or marveling at the local Ziziphus (aka Lotebush, a spiny shrub), Hillis guides first-time visitors and long-term residents alike in an appreciation for the Hill Country’s natural beauty and diversity.

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Arnold Newman
At Work
By Roy Flukinger
University of Texas Press, 2013

A driven perfectionist with inexhaustible curiosity about people, Arnold Newman was one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most prolific photographers. In a career that spanned nearly seven decades and produced many iconic works, Newman became renowned for making “pictures of people” (he objected to the term “portraits”) in the places where they worked and lived—the spaces that were most expressive of their inner lives. Refusing the label of “art photographer,” Newman also accepted magazine and advertising commissions and executed them to the same exacting standards that characterized all of his work. He spent countless hours training aspiring photographers, sharing his own vast experience, but allowing them the freedom to experiment and discover.

Rich with materials from Newman’s extensive archive in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Arnold Newman offers unprecedented, firsthand insights into the evolution of the photographer’s creativity. Reproduced here are not only many of Newman’s signature images, but also contact sheets, Polaroids, and work prints with his handwritten notes, which allow us to see the process by which he produced the images. Pages from his copious notebooks and calendars reveal Newman’s meticulous preparation and exhausting schedule. Adsheets and magazine covers from Holiday, LIFE, Newsweek, Look, Esquire, Seventeen, Time, and Sports Illustrated show the range of Newman’s largely unknown editorial work. Roy Flukinger provides a contextual overview of the archive, and Marianne Fulton’s introduction highlights the essential moments in the development of Newman’s life and work.

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The Art and Architecture of the Texas Missions
By Jacinto Quirarte
University of Texas Press, 2002

Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas

Built to bring Christianity and European civilization to the northern frontier of New Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...secularized and left to decay in the nineteenth century...and restored in the twentieth century, the Spanish missions still standing in Texas are really only shadows of their original selves. The mission churches, once beautifully adorned with carvings and sculptures on their façades and furnished inside with elaborate altarpieces and paintings, today only hint at their colonial-era glory through the vestiges of art and architectural decoration that remain.

To paint a more complete portrait of the missions as they once were, Jacinto Quirarte here draws on decades of on-site and archival research to offer the most comprehensive reconstruction and description of the original art and architecture of the six remaining Texas missions—San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo), San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, San Juan Capistrano, and San Francisco de la Espada in San Antonio and Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo in Goliad. Using church records and other historical accounts, as well as old photographs, drawings, and paintings, Quirarte describes the mission churches and related buildings, their decorated surfaces, and the (now missing) altarpieces, whose iconography he extensively analyzes. He sets his material within the context of the mission era in Texas and the Southwest, so that the book also serves as a general introduction to the Spanish missionary program and to Indian life in Texas.

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As Good As It Gets
What School Reform Brought to Austin
Larry Cuban
Harvard University Press, 2010

Take an economically and racially diverse urban school district emerging from a long history of segregation. Add an energetic, capable, bridge-building superintendent with ambitious district-wide goals to improve graduation rates, school attendance, and academic performance. Consider that he was well funded and strongly supported by city leaders, teachers, and parents, and ask how much changed in a decade of his tenure—and what remained unchanged?

Larry Cuban takes this richly detailed history of the Austin, Texas, school district, under Superintendent Pat Forgione, to ask the question that few politicians and school reformers want to touch. Given effective use of widely welcomed reforms, can school policies and practices put all children at the same academic level? Are class and ethnic differences in academic performance within the power of schools to change?

Cuban argues that the overall district has shown much improvement—better test scores, more high school graduates, and more qualified teachers. But the improvements are unevenly distributed. The elementary schools improved, as did the high schools located in affluent, well-educated, largely white neighborhoods. But the least improvement came where it was needed most: the predominantly poor, black, and Latino high schools. Before Forgione arrived, over 10 percent of district schools were failing, and after he left office, roughly the same percentage continued to fail. Austin’s signal successes amid failure hold answers to tough questions facing urban district leaders across the nation.

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Austin, Cleared for Takeoff
Aviators, Businessmen, and the Growth of an American City
By Kenneth B. Ragsdale
University of Texas Press, 2004

Austin, Texas, entered the aviation age on October 29, 1911, when Calbraith Perry Rodgers landed his Wright EX Flyer in a vacant field near the present-day intersection of Duval and 45th Streets. Some 3,000 excited people rushed out to see the pilot and his plane, much like the hundreds of thousands who mobbed Charles A. Lindbergh and The Spirit of St. Louis in Paris sixteen years later. Though no one that day in Austin could foresee all the changes that would result from manned flight, people here—as in cities and towns across the United States—realized that a new era was opening, and they greeted it with all-out enthusiasm.

This popularly written history tells the story of aviation in Austin from 1911 to the opening of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in 1999. Kenneth Ragsdale covers all the significant developments, beginning with military aviation activities during World War I and continuing through the barnstorming era of the 1920s, the inauguration of airmail service in 1928 and airline service in 1929, and the dedication of the first municipal airport in 1930. He also looks at the University of Texas's role in training pilots during World War II, the growth of commercial and military aviation in the postwar period, and the struggle over airport expansion that occupied the last decades of the twentieth century. Throughout, he shows how aviation and the city grew together and supported each other, which makes the Austin aviation experience a case study of the impact of aviation on urban communities nationwide.

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