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

The events associated with John F. Kennedy's death are etched into our nation's memory. This fascinating book tells a less familiar part of the story, about a special art exhibition organized by a group of Fort Worth citizens. On November 21, 1963, the Kennedys arrived in Fort Worth around midnight, making their way to Suite 850 of the Hotel Texas. There, installed in their honor, was an intimate exhibition that included works by Monet, Van Gogh, Marin, Eakins, Feininger, and Picasso. Due to the late hour, it was not until the following morning that the couple viewed the exhibition and...

After Tom Ketchum had been sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train, his attorneys argued that the penalty was "cruel and unusual" for the offense charged. The appeal failed and he became the first individual--and the last--ever to be executed for a crime of this sort. He was hanged in 1901; in a macabre ending to his life of crime, his head was torn away by the rope as he fell from the gallows.

Tom Ketchum was born in 1863 on a farm near the fringe of the Texas frontier. At the age of nine, he found himself an orphan and was raised by his older brothers. In his...

Finalist for the 2014 Weber-Clements Book Prize for the Best Non-fiction Book on Southwestern America

In popular culture, Wyatt Earp is the hero of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, and a beacon of rough cowboy justice in the tumultuous American West. The subject of dozens of films, he has been invoked in battles against organized crime (in the 1930s), communism (in the 1950s), and al-Qaeda (after 2001).

Yet as the historian Andrew C. Isenberg reveals in Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, the Hollywood Earp is largely a fiction--one created...

Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 1978

In their efforts to assert dominion over vast reaches of the (now U.S.) Southwest in the seventeenth century, the Spanish built a series of far-flung missions and presidios at strategic locations. One of the most important of these was San Juan Bautista del Rio Grande, located at the present-day site of Guerrero in Coahuila, Mexico.

Despite its significance as the main entry point into Spanish Texas during the colonial period, San Juan Bautista was generally forgotten until the first publication of...

Long before the Spanish colonizers established it in 1598, the "Kingdom of Nuevo Mexico" had existed as an imaginary world--and not the one based on European medieval legend so often said to have driven the Spaniards' ambitions in the New World. What the conquistadors sought in the 1500s, it seems, was what the native Mesoamerican Indians who took part in north-going conquest expeditions also sought: a return to the Aztecs' mythic land of origin, Aztlan. Employing long-overlooked historical and anthropological evidence, Danna A. Levin Rojo reveals how ideas these natives held about their...