"Promised Land "provides a close examination of the circum-stances surrounding the colonization contract issued to Henri Castro of France and the contract assumed by Germany's Adelsverein.

In Why Texans Fought in the Civil War, Charles David Grear provides insights into what motivated Texans to fight for the Confederacy. Mining important primary sources-including thousands of letters and unpublished journals-he affords readers the opportunity to hear, often in the combatants' own words, why it was so important to them to engage in tumultuous struggles occurring so far from home. As Grear notes, in the decade prior to the Civil War the population of Texas had tripled. The state was increasingly populated by immigrants from all parts of the South and foreign countries. When the...

The twentieth century has seen two great waves of African American migration from rural areas into the city, changing not only the country s demographics but also black culture. In her thorough study of migration to Houston, Bernadette Pruitt portrays the move from rural to urban homes in Jim Crow Houston as a form of black activism and resistance to racism.
Between 1900 and 1950 nearly fifty thousand blacks left their rural communities and small towns in Texas and Louisiana for Houston. Jim Crow proscription, disfranchisement, acts of violence and brutality, and rural poverty pushed...