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

The scarcity of surface water which has so marked the Great Plains is even more characteristic of its subdivision, the Texas High Plains. Settlers on the plateau were forced to use pump technology to tap the vast ground water resources--the underground rain--beneath its flat surface.

The evolution from windmills to the modern high-speed irrigation pumps took place over several decades. Three phases characterized the movement toward irrigation. In the period from 1910 to 1920, large-volume pumping plants first appeared in the region, but, due to national and regional circumstances,...

The facts are brutally straightforward. On December 6, 1991, the naked, bound-and-gagged, burned bodies of four girls--each one shot in the head--were found in a frozen yogurt shop in Austin, Texas. Grief, shock, and horror overtook the city. But after eight years of misdirected investigations, only two suspects (teenagers at the time of the crime) were tried; their convictions were later overturned and detectives are still working on what is now a very cold case. The story has grown to include DNA technology, coerced false confessions, and other developments in crime and punishment. But...

Samuel Bangs, the first printer in the territory that is now Texas, once owed his life to his printing press. One of the few survivors of the Mina Expedition to Mexico in 1817, Bangs wrote to Servando de Mier, "I had the good fortune, through the will of God, to have my life saved, as I was a printer."

Bangs was not always so fortunate. Losses and disappointments plagued him throughout his career, and he spent many miserable months in Mexican jails. But his ingenuity in the face of adversity, his courage and charm, stamped him not only as a storybook hero but as a man whose virtues...

For sixty million years, the Gila River, longer than the Hudson and the Delaware combined, has shaped the ecology of the Southwest from its source in New Mexico to its confluence with the Colorado River in Arizona. Today, for at least half its length, the Gila is dead, like so many of the West's great rivers, owing to overgrazing, damming, and other practices. This richly documented cautionary tale narrates the Gila's natural and human history. Now updated, McNamee's study traces recent efforts to resuscitate portions of this important riparian corridor.

Fighting Words profiles five journalists who published the truth as they saw it, no matter how their reporting angered politicians, social and religious leaders, or other journalists.

The five journalists are William Brann (1855-1898), Don Biggers (1868-1957), John Granbery (1874-1953), Archer Fullingim (1902-1984), and Stoney Burns Brent Stein] (1942-2011). Though they lived in different eras, all these men dealt with issues that society continues to face--racism, official corruption, religious freedom, educational reform, political extremism of the left and right, the...