When a Dallas audience in 1897 viewed the first motion picture ever shown in Texas, the state began a love affair with the movies. From the early nickelodeons to later drive-ins, Texans have spent countless hours and many dollars to watch moving pictures shown in small towns and big cities alike.
In a span of sixty-three years, from 1897 to 1960, Texans witnessed the rise and fall of the silent film, the introduction of "talkies," the drive-in, and 3-D. They saw how World War II affected the movies and watched movies transform again when the advent of television brought a new kind of...

Deeds, wills, divorce decrees, and other evidence of the public lives of nineteenth-century women belie the long-held beliefs of their public invisibility. Angela Boswell's "Her Act and Deed: Women's Lives in a Rural Southern County, 1837-1873" follows the threads of Southern women's lives as they weave through the public records of one Texas county during the middle of the nineteenth century. Her unique approach to exploring women's roles in a South that spanned the frontier, antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras illuminates the truths of the feminine world of those periods, and her...

At the crossroads of Central Texas, cotton once ruled as king. Around this demanding monarch, numerous communities grew up and thrived. From the distant horizon, the communities were marked by church steeples stretching skyward. Today, cotton has disappeared from the land, and the communities too are largely gone. Only the churches remain--the rock beneath the sands of time.
This powerfully illustrated book seeks to explain the staying power of these rural churches and to introduce the people who keep them alive while the surrounding communities have given way to the larger towns and...

In the states of the former Confederacy, Reconstruction amounted to a second Civil War, one that white southerners were determined to win. An important chapter in that undeclared conflict played out in northeast Texas, in the Corners region where Grayson, Fannin, Hunt, and Collin Counties converged. Part of that violence came to be called the Lee-Peacock Feud, a struggle in which Unionists led by Lewis Peacock and former Confederates led by Bob Lee sought to even old scores, as well as to set the terms of the new South, especially regarding the status of freed slaves. Until recently, the...

In 1895 a different kind of railroad car rolled into Texas, bringing the "good news" of the evangelical Gospel to transient railroad workers and far-flung communities alike. A ministry to railroad men and their families lay at the heart of chapel car work, which over a period of fifty years saw thirteen rail chapel cars minister to thousands of towns, mainly west of the Mississippi. Railroads that carried the Texas chapel car included the Texas & Pacific; the Missouri, Kansas & Topeka; the Southern Pacific; the International & Great Northern; and the Mexican International

Author Wilma...

Karle Wilson Baker was the best-known Texas poet of the early twentieth century. Yet, while many of her male contemporaries remain well known to Texas literature, she is not. Her energy and significant role in shaping the literature of Texas equaled those of Walter Prescott Webb or J. Frank Dobie, with whom she ranked as the first Fellows of the Texas Institute of Letters.
Her modern lifestyle as an independent, "new" woman and her active career as a writer, teacher, and lecturer placed her among the avant-garde of women in the nation, although she lived in the small town of Nacogdoches....

With their distinctive head coverings, plain dress, and quiet, unassuming demeanor, the Mennonites are a distinctive presence within the often flamboyant and proud people of Texas. If you have seen them at a gas station, in a grocery store, or even at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, you have probably taken note and wondered how they came to be there.
In this photographic tour of two Texas Mennonite communities, separated by almost 450 miles, Laura L. Camden and Susan Gaetz Duarte introduce you to the Beachy Amish Mennonites of Lott, a small community of approximately 160 people in Central...

In the intimate language of one who watched birds daily, Karle Wilson Baker brought readers face to face with the wonders of the East Texas woods in the 1930s. She wrote about tiny warblers, industrious chickadees, and purple finches; the aery trills and tantalizing color flashes of the hummingbirds; the bell tones of the wood thrush; the daily visits and rare drop-ins of the prolific bird life of the region.
In a daily diary she kept throughout her life, Baker recorded her observations of the many birds that lived in the heavily wooded setting of her Nacogdoches home, called Tanglewood....

"Texas Women on the Cattle Trails" tells the stories of sixteen women who drove cattle up the trail from Texas during the last half of the nineteenth century. Some were young; some were old (over thirty). Some took to the trails by choice; others, out of necessity. Some went along to look at the stars; others, to work the cattle. Some made money and built ranching empires, but others went broke and lived hard, even desperate lives. The courage of Margaret Borland and the spunk of Willie Matthews, the pure delight of Cornelia Adair viewing the buffalo, and the joy of Mary Bunton gazing at...

Jim Crow laws pervaded the south, reaching from the famous "separate yet equal" facilities to voting discrimination to the seats on buses. Agriculture, a key industry for those southern blacks trying to forge an independent existence, was not immune to the touch of racism, prejudice, and inequality. In "Reaping a Greater Harvest," Debra Reid deftly spotlights the hierarchies of race, class, and gender within the extension service.
Black farmers were excluded from cooperative demonstration work in Texas until the Smith-Lever Agricultural Extension act in 1914. However, the resulting Negro...