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

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...

Winner of the Wild West History Association Best Book Award
In 1874, the Texas legislature created the Frontier Battalion, the first formal, budgeted organization as an arm of state government of what historically had been periodic groups loosely referred to as Texas Rangers. Initially created to combat the menace of repeated raids of Indians from the north and from Mexico into frontier counties, the Battalion was led by an unusual choice: a frail, humorless Confederate veteran from Navarro County, John B. Jones. Under Jones's leadership, the Battalion grew in sophistication, moving...

East Texas is a distinct cultural and geographical region roughly the size of the state of Indiana. It is bounded on the east by the Sabine River and the state line, on the north by the Red River, and on the south by the Gulf of Mexico. The remaining boundary line is open to conjecture but is generally considered to represent the dispersed western limits of the Southern Pine Belt. Those who have lived and worked in East Texas share a common sense of place that has provided some of the state's more colorful characters and most enduring landmarks, as well as a richly-layered cultural...

From 1866 through 1886, the U.S. Army occupied southern Arizona and New Mexico in an attempt to claim it for settlement by Americans. Through a postcolonial lens, Janne Lahti examines the army, its officers, their wives, and the enlisted men as agents of an American empire whose mission was to serve as a group of colonizers engaged in ideological as well as military, conquest.

Cultural Construction of Empire explores the cultural and social representations of Native Americans, Hispanics, and frontiersmen constructed by the officers, enlisted men, and their...