Author: Stephen Harrigan Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 0292759517 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 944
Book Description
The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.
Author: Elbridge Gerry Littlejohn Publisher: ISBN: Category : Alamo (San Antonio, Tex.) Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Relates the stories of thirteen heroes or events in nineteenth-century Texas history, including Cabeza de Vaca, Sam Houston and the Alamo.
Author: Carol Dawson Publisher: Texas A&M University Press ISBN: 1623494567 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 421
Book Description
On the eve of its centennial, Carol Dawson and Roger Allen Polson present almost 100 years of history and never-before-seen photographs that track the development of the Texas Highway Department. An agency originally created “to get the farmer out of the mud,” it has gone on to build the vast network of roads that now connects every corner of the state. When the Texas Highway Department (now called the Texas Department of Transportation or TxDOT) was created in 1917, there were only about 200,000 cars in Texas traveling on fewer than a thousand miles of paved roads. Today, after 100 years of the Texas Highway Department, the state boasts over 80,000 miles of paved, state-maintained roads that accommodate more than 25 million vehicles. Sure to interest history enthusiasts and casual readers alike, decades of progress and turmoil, development and disaster, and politics and corruption come together once more in these pages, which tell the remarkable story of an infrastructure 100 years in the making.
Author: Jodi Thomas Publisher: Zebra Books ISBN: 9781420111736 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 391
Book Description
In this collection featuring rough-and-tumble outlaws, four popular romance authors serve up sexy stories, including one by Jodi Thomas, in which Cozette Camanez, in order to save her family's ranch, forces an unsuspecting thief into marriage. Original.
Author: Kathleen Hudson Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 9780292731363 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
In a collection of thirty-four interviews, Kathleen Hudson pursues the stories behind the songs of Texas singers like Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Lyle Lovett.
Author: Betsy Christian Publisher: Arcadia Publishing ISBN: 1625846142 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 106
Book Description
Before Texas was Texas, it was a lot of things to a lot of different people. Comanche, Choctaw, French, Spanish, Mexican and more laid claim to Texas soil as their own, and no one wanted to share. The fights and alliances that arose out of the colonization of Texas shaped the state's future. Find out all about the beginning of the state and the colonists who helped pave the way for the Texas we now know. Saddle up with Betsy and George Christian for an interactive, fun chapter in Texas history for kids that challenges them to ask questions about the history they're told and the world in which they live.
Author: Bryan Burrough Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 198488011X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
A New York Times bestseller! “Lively and absorbing. . ." — The New York Times Book Review "Engrossing." —Wall Street Journal “Entertaining and well-researched . . . ” —Houston Chronicle Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head. Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war. However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos--Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels--scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over. Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas's struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness. In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn't alienate anyone. But we are not living in one of those times; the fight over the Alamo's meaning has become more pitched than ever in the past few years, even violent, as Texas's future begins to look more and more different from its past. It's the perfect time for a wise and generous-spirited book that shines the bright light of the truth into a place that's gotten awfully dark.
Author: Lawrence Wright Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0525520112 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 307
Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.
Author: Nico Martini Publisher: Cider Mill Press ISBN: 1400252105 Category : Cooking Languages : en Pages : 513
Book Description
Texas Whiskey tells the story of how whiskey from the Lone Star State is unlike whiskey being made anywhere else on the planet. Texas history runs deep, and the history of whiskey in the state is no exception. But the Texas whiskey scene, which emphasizes local corn and barrels made from trees grown in the state, has grown exponentially in the last 10 years, as this coffee table book about whiskey in the Lone Star State details. Texas Whiskey features: A collection of over 100 varied distillery profiles Interviews with experts All original photography Tips on how to determine if a whiskey you love is truly a Texas whiskey Locals and tourists alike will discover new expressions that are sure to satisfy tastes as varied as Texas is large.
Author: Publisher: Trinity University Press ISBN: 1595348085 Category : Photography Languages : en Pages : 407
Book Description
Brown and Holley are interested in place and what makes people who they are. With particular interest in how people take the hand they’ve been dealt—fate, family, circumstance, luck—and craft a life for themselves, the authors celebrate the grit and gumption of these Texas originals. Introducing quirky characters and tenacious spirits, Holley’s stories seek out the personality of the small town while Brown’s photographs capture the essence of a changing landscape. Hometown Texas aims not to be nostalgic or sentimental but rather to show readers an unknown Texas—one that, while not vanishing, is certainly on the wane. Organized into five topographical, geographic, and cultural sections—East, West, North, South, and Central—three dozen stories and more than eighty complementary images work to create a parallel narrative to reveal what Brown has described as the “collective, various, remarkably complex soul that makes Texas unique.” Hometown Texas is an exploration across miles and cultures, of well-traveled roads and forgotten byways, deep into the heart of Texas.
Author: Stephen Harrigan
Author: Elbridge Gerry Littlejohn
Author: Carol Dawson
Author: Jodi Thomas
Author: Kathleen Hudson
Author: Betsy Christian
Author: Bryan Burrough
Author: Lawrence Wright
Author: Nico Martini
Author: