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

Profiles, meditations, essays, and explorations...For more than forty years, Toby Thompson has been considering what it means to live and work in the American West. And now, with "Riding the Rough String," a lifetime's worth of accomplishment is roped together under one cover. His wide-ranging curiosity considers not only our most luminous literary figures (Gary Snyder to Gretel Ehrlich, Thomas McGuane to Hunter Thompson) but the region's history and culture as well. Saloons and art, pickups and "A River Runs Through It," Thompson shows us the West through a new lens: unique, clear-eyed,...

In the tradition of The Perfect Storm and Seabiscuit, the engrossing tale of the fastest boat ride ever down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

In the winter of 1983, the largest El Nino event on record--a chain of "superstorms" that swept in from the Pacific Ocean--battered the entire West. That spring, a massive snowmelt...

Among the many difficulties the newly formed Confederate States of America endured in the summer of 1861 was the failure of its post office department to provide sufficient numbers of that item most crucial to its service: the postage stamp. Faced with the resulting din of customer complaints, a handful of industrious Texas postmasters solved the problem by simply making their own homemade stamps.

In this thoroughly researched history of these rare and highly coveted stamps, The Great Texas Stamp Collection traces their journey from creation through their rediscovery...

Once upon a time in Texas...there were liberal activists of various stripes who sought to make the state more tolerant and more tolerable. David Richards was one of them. In this fast-paced, often humorous memoir, he remembers the players, the strategy sessions, the legal and political battles, and the wins and losses that brought significant gains in civil rights, voter rights, labor law, and civil liberties to the people of Texas from the 1950s to the 1990s.

In his work as a lawyer, Richards was involved in cases covering voters' rights, school finance reform, and a myriad of...

The history of the Lone Star state is a narrative dominated by larger-than-life personalities and often-contentious legends, presenting interesting challenges for historians. Perhaps for this reason, Texas has produced a cadre of revered historians who have had a significant impact on the preservation (some would argue creation) of our state's past. An anthology of biographical essays, Writing the Story of Texas pays tribute to the scholars who shaped our understanding of Texas's past and, ultimately, the Texan identity.

Edited by esteemed historians Patrick Cox and...

Among the New Deal programs that transformed American life in the 1930s was legislation known as the Indian New Deal, whose centerpiece was the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934. Oddly, much of that law did not apply to Native residents of Oklahoma, even though a large percentage of the country s Native American population resided there in the 1930s and no other state was home to so many different tribes. The Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act (OIWA), passed by Congress in 1936, brought Oklahoma Indians under all of the IRA s provisions, but included other measures that applied only to...

The events of July 19, 1878, marked the beginning of what became known as the Lincoln County War and catapulted Susan McSween and a young cowboy named Henry McCarty, alias Billy the Kid, into the history books. The so-called war, a fight for control of the mercantile economy of southeastern New Mexico, is one of the most documented conflicts in the history of the American West, but it is an event that up to now has been interpreted through the eyes of men. As a woman in a man's story, Susan McSween has been all but ignored. This is the first book to place her in a larger context. Clearly,...

In 1838 Texas vice president Mirabeau B. Lamar, flush from the excitement of a successful buffalo hunt, gazed from a hilltop toward the paradise at his feet and saw the future. His poetic eye admired the stunning vista before him, with its wavering prairie grasses gradually yielding to clusters of trees, then whole forests bordering the glistening Colorado River in the distance. Lamar s equally awestruck companions, no strangers to beautiful landscapes, shuffled speechlessly nearby. But where these men saw only nature s handiwork, Lamar visualized a glorious manmade transformation--trees...

African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of their slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty.
As if Removal to Indian Territory weren t cataclysmic enough, the Civil War shattered the worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, and disrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly they were freed, but had nowhere...

The early decades of the nineteenth century brought intense political turmoil and cultural change for the Choctaw Indians. While they still lived on their native lands in central Mississippi, they would soon be forcibly removed to Oklahoma. This book makes available for the first time a key legal document from this turbulent period in Choctaw history. Originally written in Choctaw by Peter Perkins Pitchlynn (1806 1881), and painstakingly translated by linguist Marcia Haag and native speaker Henry Willis, the document is reproduced here in both Choctaw and English, with original text and...

Winner of two Communicator Awards for Cover (overall) and Cover (design), 2013.
"They Called Them Soldier Boys" offers an in-depth study of soldiers of the Texas National Guard s Seventh Texas Infantry Regiment in World War I, through their recruitment, training, journey to France, combat, and their return home. Gregory W. Ball focuses on the fourteen counties in North, Northwest, and West Texas where officers recruited the regiment s soldiers in the summer of 1917, and how those counties compared with the rest of the state in terms of political, social, and economic attitudes.

In...

Winner of the William Henry Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography, Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York, 2014.
The military career of General James Monroe Williams spanned both the Civil War and the Indian Wars in the West, yet no biography has been published to date on his important accomplishments, until now. From his birth on the northern frontier, westward movement in the Great Migration, rush into the violence of antebellum Kansas Territory, Civil War commands in the Trans-Mississippi, and as a cavalry officer in the Indian Wars, Williams was involved in...

Texans love stories, and the 15,000 roadside markers along the state's highways and byways testify to the abundance of tales to tell. History along the Way recounts the narratives behind and beyond more than one hundred Texas roadside markers.