Some of these quirky true stories might surprise even the most proud Texan. Austin sat the first all-woman state supreme court in the nation in 1925. A utopian colony thrived in Kristenstad during the Great Depression. Bats taken from the Bracken and Ney Caves and Devil's Sinkhole were developed as a secret weapon that vied with the Manhattan Project to shorten World War II. In Slaton in 1922, German priest Joseph M. Keller was kidnapped, tarred and feathered amid anti-German fervor following World War I. Author E.R. Bills offers this collection of trials, tribulations and intrigue that is...

In late July 1910, a shocking number of African Americans in Texas were slaughtered by white mobs in the Slocum area of Anderson County and the Percilla-Augusta region of neighboring Houston County. The number of dead surpassed the casualties of the Rosewood Massacre in Florida and rivaled those of the Tulsa Riots in Oklahoma, but the incident--one of the largest mass murders of blacks in American history--is now largely forgotten. Investigate the facts behind this harrowing act of genocide in E.R. Bills's compelling inquiry into the Slocum Massacre.

From 1891 to 1922, Texans burned an average of one person of color at the stake a year for three decades. These burnings typically featured carnival atmospheres with thousands in attendance, including men, women and children who later described the spectacles as jovial "barbecues" or "roasts," and commemorated the events with "lynching" postcards. It was a period when many white Texans-previously enraged by Reconstruction-reasserted white primacy and terrorized black Texans with impunity. Join author E. R. Bills in this recounting of an African American holocaust. E. R. Bills is a Texas...