For more than a century the Houston area has grown steadily and at times spectacularly. The lifeblood of the region's development has been the flow of credit; its heart, the banks that have pumped investment dollars through the economy, and particularly Texas Commerce Bank, one of the city's largest.
From the chartering of Texas Commerce's first predecessor in 1886, the bank's ancestor institutions helped finance the growth of the region's lumber, cotton, and oil industries and played important roles in Houston's civic life. One of them, the National Bank of Commerce, was long controlled...

Few department stores symbolized the aspirations of a community or represented the identity of its citizens in a stronger or more enduring way than Leonards in Fort Worth, Texas. For over fifty years, Marvin Leonard, the store's founder, and his brother Obie ran a store that was always a unique place to shop. Customers also found a stunning array of goods--fur coats and canned tuna, pianos and tractors--and an environment that combined the spectacular with the familiar.
But the story of Leonards goes beyond the store and the man who made it. For Marvin Leonard, downtown Fort Worth and...

Originally published in 1991, this pioneering work in Texas historiography, edited by Walter H. Buenger and the late Robert A. Calvert, placed the intellectual development of Texas History within the framework of current trends in the study of U.S. history. In Texas through Time, twelve eminent scholars contribute evaluations of the historical literature in their respective fields of expertise-from Texas-Mexican culture and African-American roles to agrarianism, progressivism, and the New Deal; from perspectives on women to the urban experience of the Sunbelt boom and near-bust. The...