The goal for Lambshead Ranch, located about 120 miles west of Fort Worth, Texas, has always been to convert grass into beef cattle at a profit. In Lambshead Legacy: The Ranch Diary of Watt R. Matthews, Janet Neugebauer's carefully researched annotations place Watt and his ranching efforts in the larger context of the industry - from the branding pens and the winner's circle at a stock show to a board meeting of a national breed association and times with fellow rancher Lyndon B. Johnson. The diary, focusing on Watt's life from 1951 to 1980, contains Watt's records of the number and kind of...

In Women in the Texas Populist Movement, Marion K. Barthelme presents more than a hundred letters from Texas farm women, who were becoming ever more alert to the political and economic forces impacting their lives. The agrarian reform movement was a major element of political life in Texas, and women's letters to the Texas Farmers' Alliance newspaper became increasingly passionate and forthright in expressing their concerns. The women discover a camaraderie through their letters - a recognition of their common aspirations and frustrations with a system that dismisses their experiences....

In Women in the Texas Populist Movement, Marion K. Barthelme presents more than a hundred letters from Texas farm women, who were becoming ever more alert to the political and economic forces impacting their lives. The agrarian reform movement was a major element of political life in Texas, and women's letters to the Texas Farmers' Alliance newspaper became increasingly passionate and forthright in expressing their concerns. The women discover a camaraderie through their letters - a recognition of their common aspirations and frustrations with a system that dismisses their experiences....

Texas A&M University Press has released a paperback edition of "Czech Voices: Stories from ""Texas"" in the Amerikan narodni kalenda. "Originally published in 1991, "Czech Voices "comprises ten short memoir-essays written by some of the earliest Czech immigrants to Texas. Translated and edited by Clinton Machann and James W. Mendl, Jr., "Czech Voices" offers a clear window to the lives of Czech immigrants on a difficult frontier.
Each of the ten autobiographical sketches had been published in the "Amerikan narodni kalenda "(a Czech-language magazine in Chicago. (That publication s...

In February, 1830, eighteenyearold Theodore Pavie traveled west on the Camino Real from Natchitoches, in the new state of Louisiana, to Nacogdoches, Texas, which remained under Mexican rule. Events of his trip inspired him to write stories rich in details of the LouisianaTexas border region after he returned to France.
"Le Negre" depicts the internal dynamics of a Louisiana slave community in an elemental tale of good versus evil. Pavie contrasts the nobility of the tragic hero, once a tribal chief in Africa, with the inhumanity of his white overseer.
"Le Lazo" is one of the first...

Churches play a vital role in African American culture, and not just as houses of worship. They also stand at the center of the political, educational, and social lives of black Americans.
In "Black Churches in Texas, " Clyde McQueen catalogues 374 black congregations, each at least one hundred years old, in the parts of Texas where most blacks were likely to have settled--east of Interstate Highway 35 and from the Red River to the Gulf of Mexico. Ninety-nine counties are divided into five regions: Central Texas, East Texas, the Gulf Coast, North Texas, and South Texas. For each...

Churches play a vital role in African American culture, and not just as houses of worship. They also stand at the center of the political, educational, and social lives of black Americans.

In Black Churches in Texas, Clyde McQueen catalogues 374 black congregations, each at least one hundred years old, in the parts of Texas where most blacks were likely to have settled--east of Interstate Highway 35 and from the Red River to the Gulf of Mexico. Ninety-nine counties are divided into five regions: Central Texas, East Texas, the Gulf Coast, North Texas, and South Texas. For each...

Though three times burned in effigy for his political activities, Ashbel Smith was an admired and influential leader in nineteenth-century Texas. A doctor educated at Yale and abroad, the "father of Texas medicine" championed higher standards of medical practice and helped found the state's medical society. He worked persistently to establish free public education in Texas and in his later years led the way in founding Prairie View State Normal School, the University of Texas (which he also served as regent), and the university's medical school at Galveston.
In the first full-length...

An innovative contribution to the growing body of research about urban African-American culture in the South, Black Dixie is the first anthology to track the black experience in a single southern city across the entire slavery/post-slavery continuum. It combines the best previously published scholarship about black Houston and little-known contemporary eyewitness accounts of the city with fresh, unpublished essays by historians and social scientists.
Divided into four sections, the book covers a broad range of both time and subjects. The first section analyzes the development of scholarly...

On a few sandy acres in the middle of the harsh, wild prairie of South Texas, young Helen Sewell grew to adulthood, as hardy and tenacious as the brush that grew around her. This is her story.
In 1908, at the age of eleven, Helen moved with her family to what would later become Jim Hogg County. Shaped by her rugged environment, she worked with her father in the field doing a man's work for three years, without benefit of schools, churches, or medical attention. Then, filled with desire for an education, she began to acquire an unorthodox, haphazard one that eventually led to college. She...