When veteran columnist A. C. Greene turns his eyes on Texas, he sees a variety of experiences and a scope of history that fascinate the rest of us. Under its annexation terms, Texas is allowed to divide itself into as many as six states. While that is not ever likely to happen, Greene masterfully shows that several cultural states "do" exist within the one political entity of Texas--and have throughout the state's history.
Greene has a wide-ranging curiosity about the "facts" of Texas history: what lies behind them, what quirks of human nature they reveal, how the people who lived them...

Newspaperman Don Hampton Biggers witnessed the last years of the West Texas frontier and grew intrigued with the buffalo hunters, the early cattlemen, and the stories they told. As the twentieth century began, he was collecting and publishing the recollections of old-timers who had participated in making Texas history.This book combines two of Biggers s works, History That Will Never Be Repeated> (1901) and Pictures of the Past (1902) both rare and coveted by collectors of Texana. The two, republished in 1991 as a Book Club of Texas special edition and trade clothbound edition, are now...

Undaunted by the furor caused by his first listing, A. C. Greene offers a new selective survey for anyone who wants to know more about Texas and Texas books. Each of the selections in The 50+ Best Books on Texas have been completely rewritten, or added to, or updated in this 1998 offering.

This book brings alive what one man feels about his childhood home. The place is West Texas, seen across a long vista in which today's events and people merge with the author's boyhood and young manhood. It is a harsh, remote country, where the weather is always very close and the horizon far away. The Brazos country of long-ago Fourth of July fishing expeditions; the grass-grown remains of a way station of the Butterfield Stage Line; the streets of Abilene; the sparse grazing lands under infinite skies-all are made resonant by a native son's affection and understanding. It is a way of...

Short as the life of the Southern Overland Mail turned out to beless than three years in its spanthe saga of the Butterfield Trail remains a romantic high point in the westward movement, forming familiar elements in historical plots, functioning as a vibrant backdrop against which mythic adventures, western thrillers, movie serials, and television spectacles have raced. A. C. Greene offers a history and guide to retrace that historic and romantic Trail.
Today, more than a century and a third after the first Butterfield coaches rolled, we are hard put to imagine how awesome, how fearful...