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Historian Mike Cox has been writing about Texas history for four decades, sharing tales that have been overlooked or forgotten through the years. Travel to El Paso during the "Big Blow" of 1895, brave the frontier with Elizabeth Russell Baker, and stare down the infamous killer known as Old Three Toe. From frontier stories and ghost towns to famous folks and accounts of everyday life, this collection of West Texas Tales has it all.
2nd Edition. This book is a peek into the Texas psyche and explains why Texans are the way they are...where all that attitude comes from.
Part of our growing Mysteries and Legends series, Mysteries and Legends of Texas explores unusual phenomena, strange events, and mysteries in Texas’s history. Each episode included in the book is a story unto itself, and the tone and style of the book is lively and easy to read for a general audience interested in Texas history.
Cold facts and impersonal statistics may be the bacon of Texas history, but the tall tales and interesting side stories are the sizzle. In this book, C.F. Charlie Eckhardt presents some of the Texas history sizzle that is often ignored when pure historians write about the Lone Star State. He adds to the flavor of Texas history with tales about such things as the first Texas revolution, the first English speaking person in Texas, and the little known counterrevolution of 1838-1840. Charlie examines the expulsion of the Cherokees from Texas and provides details of some of the more famous Indian fights. Charlie also shows his romantic side with the legend of the famous Yellow Rose of Texas.
The deputy sheriff or sheriff of a county often is perceived as the lone officer protecting the citizens of a small town. Country Cop is the riveting story of one such deputy sheriff, Barry Goodson, and his experiences with the Parker County Sheriff’s office in the 1990s and early 2000s in North Texas. Goodson was required to answer any call for service within an area roughly the size of Rhode Island (just under 1000 square miles), where a backup officer could be many miles away, and so he often patrolled and handled calls alone in a county renowned for being a haven for drug manufacturers and dealers. Goodson puts the reader in his patrol car to vicariously share what it is like to be in county law enforcement. He reveals his officer’s skills, which include the ability to identify an offender immediately, to assess that offender’s immediate intent (apparent or not), and to decide on proper action before the offender can unleash his or her attack on that deputy or against the originally intended victim. More often than not, he employed “verbal judo” to de-escalate a situation instead of drawing his gun. Calls from dispatch ranged from a simple need to clear livestock from the highways to shots fired or a 150 mph high-speed auto chase of drug dealers. More often, drug dealer attacks erupted during a perceived normal traffic stop with the offender suddenly producing a weapon, forcing Goodson to use force to subdue the individual. During one domestic violence call Goodson and another officer forced entry to stop a violent father from extreme violence against his wife and two teenage sons, but then Goodson had to intercept the wife as she lunged forward with a pair of long scissors in an attempt to stab the other officer in the back. Country Cop gives the inside story of county law enforcement and will prove a valuable resource for those in criminal justice, those who aspire to a career in law enforcement, and to all who enjoy a good police story.
J. David Bamberger has been profiled in the New York Times and the New Yorker, interviewed on NPR, and featured in a National Geographic video. He and his Texas Hill Country ranch have been the subject of many articles and two books published by Texas A&M University Press. In My Stories, All True, Bamberger, now in his nineties, tells the story of his life as an entrepreneur and conservationist in his own way. He recounts to journalist and friend Pamela LeBlanc how he made a living as a vacuum cleaner salesman, struck it rich as a partner in a wildly successful chain of fried chicken restaurants, and bought, then brought back to life, the “sorriest piece of land” in Blanco County, Texas—the rural oasis he calls Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve. For more than a year, Bamberger and LeBlanc roamed the preserve—five thousand acres nursed back to environmental health with money earned from the sale of Church’s Chicken—as Bamberger reminisced about losing his father in a steel factory accident; gathering mushrooms to sell to neighbors when he was a kid; making a living as a door-to-door salesman; running a multimillion-dollar restaurant business; rubbing shoulders with the likes of Sam Walton, Jane Goodall, and Lady Bird Johnson; and, finally, turning to his land for the work that has earned national acclaim. With a storyteller’s flair and insightful commentary from LeBlanc, Bamberger shares the tales of a remarkable life—as a resourceful country boy, a savvy entrepreneur, and a consummate conservationist whose vision has set the standard for the restoration of nature on private lands worldwide.
"From 1899 to 1906, Colonel Baylor wrote fifty-two articles for the El Paso Daily Herald. The articles, ably edited and annotated by historian Thompson, vary from accounts of the Civil War in El Paso and the Mesilla Valley, to fights with Comanches in North Texas and Victorio's Apaches in the mountains of Chihuahua. Baylor also recalls the ill-fated 1850-1851 Parker H. French Expedition and life in the California gold fields. Also included are biographical sketches of "Don Santiago" Magoffin and Baylor's controversial older brother, Col. John Robert Baylor." "Some of Baylor's most valuable writings are his Civil War recollections. These include accounts of the surrender of Federal forces at St. Agustin Springs, New Mexico in 1861, the massacre of Lt. Reuben E. Mays and fourteen Confederates deep in the arid expanses of the Big Bend, his service as senior aide to Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, the Red River Campaign, and an amazingly objective account of how he came to kill Gen. John A. Wharton at the Fannin Hotel in Houston in April 1865."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Some of these quirky true stories might surprise even the most proud Texan. Austin sat the first all-woman state supreme court in the nation in 1925. A utopian colony thrived in Kristenstad during the Great Depression. Bats taken from the Bracken and Ney Caves and Devil's Sinkhole were developed as a secret weapon that vied with the Manhattan Project to shorten World War II. In Slaton in 1922, German priest Joseph M. Keller was kidnapped, tarred and feathered amid anti-German fervor following World War I. Author E.R. Bills offers this collection of trials, tribulations and intrigue that is sure to enrich one's understanding of the biggest state in the Lower Forty-eight.
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.
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.