Houston was Boomtown USA in the 1970s, growing through tremendous immigration of people and through frequent annexation of outlying areas. But in the shadow of the high-rise "petropolis" was another city ignored by and invisible to Houston municipal boosters and the national media. Black Houston, the largest black community in the South, remained largely untouched by the benefits of the boom but bore many of the burdens.
Robert D. Bullard systematically explores major demographic, social, economic, and political factors that helped make Houston the "golden buckle" of the Sunbelt. He then...

The major cities of Texas have developed through a complex web of politics, society, and economics. To describe and explain the state's urban evolution, the contributors to "Urban Texas" use comparative and multidisciplinary perspectives that explore the relationships among interest groups and voting; religion, reform, gender, and race; civic clubs and suburbs; infrastructure and land development.
Texas' cities have experienced boom and expansion, bust and depression. They have also been marked by inequity and disadvantage. Today's cities face not only the limits of a period of economic...

In honoring the heroic legend of the Texas Revolution, generations of scholars and Texans themselves have cleansed the revolution of its messier--and perhaps more truly revolutionary--dimensions. Focusing on the pre-existing causes of the conflict of 1835-36 and the military execution of the war, they have neglected the political turbulence, regional disharmonies, conflicts of interest, social upheaval, and racial and ethnic strife that characterized the period. This groundbreaking work on the Texas Revolution offers the first systematic analysis of the event as political and social history....

Even before the Depression, unemployment, low wages, substandard housing, and poor health plagued many women in what was then one of America's poorest cities--San Antonio. Divided by tradition, prejudice, or law into three distinct communities of Mexican Americans, Anglos, and African Americans, San Antonio women faced hardships based on their personal economic circumstances as well as their identification with a particular racial or ethnic group.
"Women of the Depression," first published in 1984, presents a unique study of life in a city whose society more nearly reflected divisions by...

A decade before the celebrated mountain men entered the Northern Plains and Rockies, some dozen little-known trading forays were launched into the plains of the Southwest. Anthony Glass led one of the most important.
In 1808-1809, with a party of twelve hunter-traders, he acted as semi-official emissary of the U.S. government in the practically uncharted lands of the Taovaya-Wichita and Comanche Indians. His was the first party of whites ever to view the sixteen-hundred-pound meteorite venerated as a healing shrine by the Plains tribes. Alone among the early southwestern traders, Glass...

Before the discovery of oil and the advent of Progressivism to Texas, the state dealt with prison overcrowding by leasing convicts and their labor to private industry and funneling the profits into the state's coffers. In this book, Donald R. Walker examines economic, social, and political aspects of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Texas that resulted in the leasing system and its eventual demise.
Convict leasing resulted in high mortality rates among prisoners, and stories of abusive guards and intolerable conditions were common. Blacks, who lacked social standing, legal...