In the middle of the nineteenth century more than 7,000 Germans migrated to Central Texas--most to Comal, Gillespie, and Llano Counties. For the next three quarters of a century, the Germans of Central Texas retained much of their ethnicity: they were taught German in the schools, there were German-language newspapers, and ties to the Fatherland remained strong. But with the coming of World War I, many of the Hill Country Germans began slipping away from the old ways. The generation that grew up between the two world wars became more and more Americanized.
In "Tales from the Sunday...

Betsy Colquitt has long been recognized as one of Texas' finest poets. With the publication of this collection, readers can see for the first time the full range of her work.
The "Eve" poems, which give the volume its title, are new in substance and tone. This exciting sequence traces the life of the first woman from her creation by the "Great Mother," through the years in the Garden of Eden, where Eve helps bring Adam out of the mud of Mother Earth, down to the present, as Eve looks at life and comments from the perspective of wise and eternal Woman. At the end of the sequence, Eve is...

Set in the river bottoms of southeast Texas where the Navasota and Brazos rivers come together, "High John the Conqueror" tells the story of African American cotton farmers struggling to hold on to their land during the last years of the Great Depression.
Central to the story are sharecroppers Ruby Lee and Cleveland Webster and John Cheney, a rich, white plantation owner who has farms and tenants and sharecroppers scattered all across the Brazos/Navasota country. Ruby Lee and Cleveland are sharecroppers on Cheney's land, but Cleveland's parents are struggling to hold on to the farm they...

"A Woman of the People" is one of Texas best-known and most-respected novels. In this story of the Texas frontier, Capps dramatizes the capture by a Comanche band of a ten-year-old white girl and her five-year-old sister from the upper reaches of the Brazos River a decade before the Civil War.
As the narrative progresses, Helen Morrison slowlyand almost unbeknownst to herselfgoes from being a frightened, rebellious white girl to becoming a woman of the people. Like many of the people who figure in true-life Indian captivity narratives, Helen adopts the ways of the Comanches, marries a...

This Texas Traditions Series reprint takes us back to the Lone Star State during the Cold War at the beginning of the 1960s. The postwar generation is in a frenzy of high living and profligate spending. Big Texas oil is still subsidized by a federal depletion allowance and cattle still account for much of the state's wealth. But these longtime mainstays of Texas finance are giving way to transistors and computers. A new millionaire class is growing up around business mergers and electronic technology.
The characters in Shrake's novel are caught in this brave new world in one way or...

Aware that some may see the title of this volume as an oxymoron, James Ward Lee argues in his "Argumentative Introduction" that for more than a century Fort Worth writers have written well about a city too often dismissed as a semi-rural cow town. Writers have celebrated its world of cattle and oil, to be sure, but many have seen other sides of Fort Worth--the country club set, the literati, the artists and artisans, the musicians, the intellectuals, and the whole minority sub-culture that has given a cosmopolitan tone to the Queen City of the Prairies.
Fort Worth is in many ways the most...