Download Free The Road To Texas Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Road To Texas and write the review.

In the spring of 1844, a fiery political conflict erupted over the admission of Texas into the Union. This hard-fought and bitter controversy profoundly changed the course of American history. Indeed, as Joel Silbey argues in Storm Over Texas, it marked the crucial moment when partisan differences were transformed into a North-vs-South antagonism, and the momentum towards Civil War leaped into high gear. Silbey, one of America's most renowned political historians, offers a swiftly paced and compelling narrative of the Texas imbroglio, which included an exceptional cast of characters, from John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams, to James K. Polk and Martin Van Buren. We see how a series of unexpected moves, some planned, some inadvertent, sparked a crisis that intensified and crystallized the North-South divide. Sectionalism, Silbey shows, had often been intense, but rarely widespread and generally well contained by other forces. After Texas statehood, it became a driving force in national affairs, ultimately leading to Southern secession and Civil War. With subtlety, great care, and much imagination, Joel Silbey shows that this brief political struggle became, in the words of an Alabama congressman, "the greatest question of the age"--and a pivotal moment in American history.
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.
Trammel’s Trace tells the story of a borderlands smuggler and an important passageway into early Texas. Trammel’s Trace, named for Nicholas Trammell, was the first route from the United States into the northern boundaries of Spanish Texas. From the Great Bend of the Red River it intersected with El Camino Real de los Tejas in Nacogdoches. By the early nineteenth century, Trammel’s Trace was largely a smuggler’s trail that delivered horses and contraband into the region. It was a microcosm of the migration, lawlessness, and conflict that defined the period. By the 1820s, as Mexico gained independence from Spain, smuggling declined as Anglo immigration became the primary use of the trail. Familiar names such as Sam Houston, David Crockett, and James Bowie joined throngs of immigrants making passage along Trammel’s Trace. Indeed, Nicholas Trammell opened trading posts on the Red River and near Nacogdoches, hoping to claim a piece of Austin’s new colony. Austin denied Trammell’s entry, however, fearing his poor reputation would usher in a new wave of smuggling and lawlessness. By 1826, Trammell was pushed out of Texas altogether and retreated back to Arkansas Even so, as author Gary L. Pinkerton concludes, Trammell was “more opportunist than outlaw and made the most of disorder.”
Johnny Texas has more to fear from greedy, dishonest men than from wild animals during a six-hundred-mile trip to Mexico and back over the Old San Antonio Road.
With over 30 carefully selected scenic drives, this book offers myriad ways to explore the Land of Enchantment. Pass through the foothills of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains, stop in the ghost town of Madrid, or gaze at the immense caves of Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
Amasa Clark's Journey: The Road from New York to Texas In 1847, at the age of 21, Amasa Clark answered the call to arms and joined the United States Army near Troy, New York. Little did he know that he was beginning an odyssey that would take him to fight in the Mexican War and ultimately leave him in Texas to become one of that state's most important pioneers. Amasa Clark became a freighter, a shingle-maker, and a successful farmer. He showed that fruit trees, particularly pear trees, would grow in the Central Texas climate and soil. He worked at the Alamo and hunted with the Indians before trading a yoke of oxen and a six-shooter for a farm near Bandera, Texas. This book chronicles his life in he 1800's including the War in Mexico, an attack by robbers near San Antonio, friendly and unfriendly Indians, working with the camels at Camp Verde, the difficult years of the Civil War, three marriages and nineteen children. This Texana book endeavors to give color and dimension to Amasa Clark's life by weaving his story with the history and culture of early New York and Texas.
On a long dark road in deep East Texas, James Byrd Jr. was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck one summer night in 1998. The brutal modern-day lynching stunned people across America and left everyone at a loss to explain how such a heinous crime could possibly happen in our more racially enlightened times. Many eventually found an answer in the fact that two of the three men convicted of the murder had ties to the white supremacist Confederate Knights of America. In the ex-convict ringleader, Bill King, whose body was covered in racist and satanic tattoos, people saw the ultimate monster, someone so inhuman that his crime could be easily explained as the act of a racist psychopath. Few, if any, asked or cared what long dark road of life experiences had turned Bill King into someone capable of committing such a crime. In this gripping account of the murder and its aftermath, Ricardo Ainslie builds an unprecedented psychological profile of Bill King that provides the fullest possible explanation of how a man who was not raised in a racist family, who had African American friends in childhood, could end up on death row for viciously killing a black man. Ainslie draws on exclusive in-prison interviews with King, as well as with Shawn Berry (another of the perpetrators), King's father, Jasper residents, and law enforcement and judicial officials, to lay bare the psychological and social forces—as well as mere chance—that converged in a murder on that June night. Ainslie delves into the whole of King's life to discover how his unstable family relationships and emotional vulnerability made him especially susceptible to the white supremacist ideology he adopted while in jail for lesser crimes. With its depth of insight, Long Dark Road not only answers the question of why such a racially motivated murder happened in our time, but it also offers a frightening, cautionary tale of the urgent need to intervene in troubled young lives and to reform our violent, racist-breeding prisons. As Ainslie chillingly concludes, far from being an inhuman monster whom we can simply dismiss, "Bill King may be more like the rest of us than we care to believe."
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.
Discover the strange, sublime, and breathtaking sights of Texas with this illustrated guide featuring thirty backroad excursions. The second largest state in America, Texas is home to a vast array of hidden treasures waiting just off the beaten path. Backroads of Texas guides readers to intriguing sites, offbeat characters, and glorious landscapes that are typically missed by interstate travelers. Watch frenzied bats as they fly by the thousands from San Angelo’s Foster Road Bridge. Catch your breath as you drink in the majestic Guadalupe Mountains. Get ready for goosebumps when you spelunk into the shadowy depths of Inner Space Cavern. And try not to get spooked when you see the paranormal “ghost lights” near the eclectic town of Marfa. These off-road sights are what truly set the Lone Star State apart from its neighbors. Completely reimagined for a new generation of road-trip takers and explorers, Backroads of Texas is lavishly illustrated with photographs, maps, and vintage advertising of Texas’s many scenic, historic, and cultural attractions.