Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - Southwest (AZ, NM, OK, TX)

Where water supply, railway transportation, and oil reserves have been abundant, towns in central West Texas have prospered; where these resources are few, settlements have maintained only slight growth or disappeared entirely. Supporting his conclusions with profuse statistical evidence, Robert L. Martin traces the economic development of six major towns in the area, all with over 10,000 residents in 1960: Lamesa, Snyder, Sweetwater, Big Spring, Midland, and Odessa.

Ranching brought the first settlers to West Texas in the 1870s and dominated the economy until 1900. In the 1880s...

In 2010, Santa Fe officially turned 400--four centuries of a rich and contentious history of Indian, Spanish, and American interactions. Pueblo Indians settled along the banks of the Rio Santa Fe as long ago as the sixth century CE. By 1610, Spanish colonists had established the town as a distant outpost in Spain's expanding empire. Drawing on recent archaeological discoveries and historical research, this updated edition of a classic history details the town's founding, its survival through revolt and reconquest, its turbulent politics, its lively trade with Mexico and the United States,...

Ellen Bowie Holland grew up in a house at Weatherford, Texas, that had the "motherly look of a large and gallant hen hovering over too many chicks" and that was inhabited by a "lively, warm-hearted family." This book is her record of the "whole world of little things which enriched young lives" in her small town.

Blessed with a discerning and sympathetic eye, she had much happiness to remember and record, and she employs a charming combination of nostalgia and comedy as she brings to life again these bygone days. Her childhood experiences are illuminated by the wisdom of maturity,...

Arriving in New Mexico in 1899, Kenneth Milton Chapman took on all manner of projects: mapping archaeological ruins, judging Pueblo pottery, teaching art, and studying ancient and modern Indian design. He became an "art archaeologist," a self-made expert riding the line between disciplines. When he moved to Santa Fe in 1909, he found himself in the midst of the city's identity crisis. Eventually, he played a part in virtually all of the central institutions and critical events that shaped Santa Fe, but he has remained in the shadows. His hard work behind the scenes was obscured by the...

Amelia Elizabeth White (1878 1972) was born into an East Coast world of wealth and privilege. After serving as army nurses in Europe during World War I, she and her sister Martha chose to settle in the small town of Santa Fe, New Mexico. There Elizabeth became a passionate advocate for Pueblo Indian rights, an inspired patron and promoter of Indian art, and a dedicated community activist for the preservation of Santa Fe s history. White organized several traveling expositions of Indian art and was instrumental in founding the Indian Arts Fund, the Laboratory of Anthropology, the Old Santa...

"A Texas governor has only two happy days: the day he is inaugurated and the day he retires."

So spoke Joseph D. Sayers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now, in an analysis of the Texas governorship by Fred Gantt, Jr., the reader learns why Governor Sayers' remark remains true many years after it was uttered: the office has come to be so demanding that the reader may ask why anyone would want it. Price Daniel described a typical day: "The governor's job is a night-and-day job; I usually get up in the morning about seven and start answering the telephone, and then look over...

The activities of a young boy on a small farm in the Texas Cross Timbers during the 1880s seem especially distant today. No one can remember the adventure of a sixteen-and-a-half-mile journey, which consumed the greater part of a day; or hurried predawn dressing in a frosty cold loft while the fragrance of a hearty breakfast wafted upward through the floor cracks; or a two-room schoolhouse, where the last half of Friday afternoon was given over to "speaking pieces" or to spelling and ciphering matches.

Through the recollections of Edward Everett Dale we are able to view a pattern of...

John H. Reagan was one of the most important figures in Texas history; this was the first biography of him to be published. Reagan, who was born in Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1818, came to Texas twenty-one years later--while Texas was still a republic--and stayed to play many major roles in its later economic and political development.

In this excellent biography, Ben H. Procter not only re-creates for us the character of the man, with his forthright integrity and his boundless desire for knowledge, but also places him against the background of the time in which he lived. In vivid...