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

In a state assumed to have a constitutionally weak governor, the Speaker of the Texas House wields enormous power, with the ability to almost single-handedly dictate the legislative agenda. The House Will Come to Order charts the evolution of the Speaker's role from a relatively obscure office to one of the most powerful in the state. This fascinating account, drawn from the Briscoe Center's oral history project on the former Speakers, is the story of transition, modernization, and power struggles.

Weaving a compelling story of scandal, service, and opportunity, Patrick...

Texas has one of the largest Jewish populations in the South and West, comprising an often-overlooked vestige of the Diaspora. The Chosen Folks brings this rich aspect of the past to light, going beyond single biographies and photographic histories to explore the full evolution of the Jewish experience in Texas.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and synthesizing earlier research, Bryan Edward Stone begins with the crypto-Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the late sixteenth century and then discusses the unique Texas-Jewish communities that...

Winner of the Best Book Award from the Wild West History Association, 2012.
Ira Aten (1862-1953) was the epitome of a frontier lawman. When as a youth he heard of the killing by Rangers of the notorious outlaw Sam Bass at Round Rock, Aten's neighborhood, he altered his plans of being a cowboy and instead set his sights on becoming a Texas Ranger. At age twenty he enrolled in Company D during the transition of the Rangers from Indian fighters to topnotch peace officers. This unit--and Aten--would have a lively time making their mark in nineteenth-century Texas.

The preponderance of...

Some 13,000 years ago, humans were drawn repeatedly to a small valley in what is now Central Texas, near the banks of Buttermilk Creek. These early hunter-gatherers camped, collected stone, and shaped it into a variety of tools they needed to hunt game, process food, and subsist in the Texas wilderness. Their toolkit included bifaces, blades, and deadly spear points. Where they worked, they left thousands of pieces of debris, which have allowed archaeologists to reconstruct their methods of tool production. Along with the faunal material that was also discarded in their prehistoric...

With more than 400 photographs, extensive interviews with the descendants of pioneer Jewish Texan families, and reproductions of rare historical documents, Natalie Ornish s "Pioneer Jewish Texans" quickly became a classic following its original release in 1989.
This new Texas A&M University Press edition presents Ornish s meticulous research and her fascinating historical vignettes for a new generation of readers and historians. She chronicles Jewish buccaneers with Jean Lafitte at Galveston; she tells of Jewish patriots who fought at the Alamo and at virtually every major engagement...