Bücher veröffentlicht von Texas A & M University Press

Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.

A study of post-Civil War Texas, following the rise and functioning of the Republican party until 1874. It focuses on Republican leaders, constituents, ideology, policies and relations with the national party in an attempt to uncover the basis of the Southern Republican movement.

The Mexican American community's relationship with the Anglodominated public school system has been multifaceted, complex, and ambiguous to say the least. On one level, an organized community has consistently struggled for equality in the existing educational institutions. Its story, although full of crushed hopes and legal frustrations, is imbued with a sense of accomplishment. At another level, individual Mexican Americans who have attended segregated public schools over the years also have a complex and diverse story to tell. For some, there are fond memories of school activities gone by. For others, the school years have been negative in general_children have been victims of humiliating and depressing incidents of racial discrimination and social ostracism. Texas' public school system is of particular historical interest because of the state's record, according to Guadalupe San Miguel, for providing the least amount of public education for Mexican Americans while fiercely defending its record of inferior and separate schooling. Additionally, Texas was the first state in which Mexican Americans organized to seek educational equality. In "Let All of Them Take Heed," first published in 1987 and one of the earliest books to focus on this plight of the Hispanic community, San Miguel traces the Mexican American quest for educational equality in Texas over a period of fifty years. In describing this struggle over the years, he emphasizes the socioeconomic factors affecting it and the strategies the Hispanic community used to reach its goals.

The Moluccas Islands; the invasions of Leyte, Mindoro and Luzon; Iwo Jima; Okinawa - these and other important naval actions of World War II are recounted in this work by an enlisted sailor and former journalist, Orvill Raines, in poignant and graphic letters to his wife.

Combining documentary history and first-person accounts with research and evidence, this text provides details on the Battle of Glorieta, including the precise locations of events and of particular units. It marshals evidence to the conclusion that the battle was a significant Union victory.

"They came, they saw, they liked it," Stanley Marcus recalls of 1936 - the year "the rest of America discovered Texas." That year, in the midst of the nation's depression, the Lone Star State extravagantly celebrated the centennial of its independence from Mexico with fervor, fanfare, and hoop-la. Spawned by pride, patriotism, and a large measure of economic self-interest, the 1936 centennial observances marked a high tide of ethnocentrism in Texas and etched a new image of the state. In 1923 the Advertising Clubs of Texas launched the centennial movement to advertise the state nationally and stimulate tourism and outside investment in the Texas economy. The Texas legislature, responding to a groundswell of patriotism, appropriated $3 million in centennial funding, which the federal government subsequently matched. The state legislature provided for both local celebrations (some 250) and a central exposition. Regional museums, historical restorations, and a statewide historical marker program permanently commemorated the event. The focal point of the celebration was the Central Exposition-a World's Fair-held in Dallas. When Fort Worth staged an unofficial, competing exposition, the slogan was born: "Go to Dallas for Education; Come to Fort Worth for Entertainment." Live radio broadcasts, architectural innovations, industrial progress, and Texas history were showcased in Dallas; Billy Rose's spectacular Frontier Exposition with Sally Rand and the Casa Manana promoted Fort Worth. By the end of the centennial year, America had learned where-and to an extend, what-Texas was. The Lone Star State would never be the same.

Puritan culture in many respects militated against artistic expression. Yet, like nature, art persisted, managing to gain a foothold in whatever crevices Puritan culture provided. Jonathan Edwards's artistry, evident in his deliberate experiments in the management of language, grew out of his duty as a minister to communicate his sermons effectively. Emphasizing recurrent theological and artistic implications, The Writings of Jonathan Edwards focuses on the progressive interiorization of Edwards's primary concerns. Underlying this development was Edwards's desire to resolve the question of whether he was one of God's elect, and his search for genuine selfhood or identity resulted in autobiographical dimensions in many of his public writings. In his quest for true identity, Edwards aligned himself with Puritan orthodoxy, and his regard for tradition is a consistent theme in his work from his earliest notes to his last treatises. Within Puritan tradition Edwards perceived a collective self, a divinely ordained continuity and integrity immune to the vicissitudes of time. Scheick's study will appeal to scholars and students of American literature, history, and culture as well as to those with a special interest in the relation between art and theology. As an explication of Edwards's writings and of the development of his thought, the study will make Edwards more easily accessible to students of American literature.

Ninety years ago Dallas was a small town filled with horse-drawn carriages, corner grocery shops, tree-lined streets, and rambling frame houses. It was the Victorian era, with different behavioral codes for boys and girls. Mrs. Willie Lewis, who grew up in turn-of-the-century Dallas, recalls with great clarity her life in the city, from early youth to old age, weaving her own experiences into the larger fabric of a community on the verge of the jet age. The result is a remarkable study of human behavior set against the rapidly changing world of Dallas at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the story of the marriage of Willie, a twenty-year-old Dallas debutante loved and protected by her family, and Will, a forty-two-year-old cattle rancher financially independent since his late teens, who began as a cowboy and eventually amassed a fortune in cattle and ranchland. In the course of their marriage, which allied two very different personalities, Willie made her own life in Dallas while her husband managed his ranches in the Panhandle. During Will's long absences, Willie raised four children and ran a household as though without a husband. She vividly recounts day-to-day crises, joys, and disappointments and reflects thoughtfully on over ninety years of life. The result is an absorbing glimpse into the past, offering insights to students of urban history, the Victorian age, social mores, Texas and the Southwest, cattlemen and cowboys, and the intricacies of human relationships.

Americans have long lived with an optimistic view of their society, what might be termed the "egalitarian idea." The antebellum South, with its peculiar institution of Negro slavery, has stood in general as the most likely exception to this ideal, though the "planter vs. plain folk" debate has engaged generations of scholars. How closely did the South approximate the "egalitarian ideal"? And how did the South compare with the rest of the nation in terms of economic and political arrangements? Wealth and Power in Antebellum Texas investigates these questions for a relatively young and rapidly developing part of the slave South. Relying on quantitative evidence gathered from census records as well as on traditional historical materials, the authors examine all measures of the "egalitarian ideal" in the Lone Star state. Their close analysis of wealthholding, the interplay of economic and political relationships, and the direction and degree of change from 1850 to 1860 reveals a high and stable level of inequality in the distribution of wealth, a high concentration of wealthholding in Texas towns, and clear indication that those who held the greatest share of wealth also held the balance of political power. Where possible, comparisons have been made with other areas of the United States. Surprisingly, wealth in Texas before the Civil War was no more unequally distributed than it was elsewhere in the country, both North and South, during the same period. The "egalitarian ideal" may have been largely mythical in antebellum Texas, but it seems to have been equally mythical in the nation as a whole.

In the summer of 1917, more than two hundred American men volunteered for service in England's Royal Flying Corps, where they would be trained to fly with the Allies until American squadrons could be organized. John MacGavock Grider, assigned to Royal Air Force Number 85 Squadron, flying SE-5a pursuit planes, was shot down and killed some twenty miles behind German lines in the summer of 1918. He was not a hero, nor were his training and combat experiences much different from those of his fellow pilots. He is set apart only by the records he kept of his experiences during that year. This is Grider's story, but in telling it he encompasses the opinions and prejudices, the successes and failures, the lives and deaths of those 210 volunteers. He details the rigors of training, the terrors of combat, and the respite of social activities. Of this group, fifty-two were killed in training or in combat, thirty were wounded, fourteen became prisoners of war, and twenty dropped out of training under the mental pressures of combat flying. After the war, many of these pilots returned home without rank or medals, suffering by comparison with the much-decorated pilots from the American front. This book is not an attempt to make heroes of these men, but rather to tell the story of one man and his friends, who fought for the United States in World War I as guests of an ally in a strange land.

Were the Austronesians hapless travelers on fragile craft, drifted at the mercy of the waves to the far-flung islands of the Pacific? Or were they intrepid seafarers whose exploratory voyages covered much of the great ocean on seaworthy canoes capable of being sailed against the wind? This book addresses these questions in one of the most thorough discussions of Austronesian sailing canoes ever attempted. The canoes themselves are described in detail, and similarities and differences in hull configuration, sails, and sailing techniques are noted. A review of earlier writings on the canoes repeats the earlier understanding of their origins: that the earliest canoes were the double-outrigger type and that single-outrigger canoes came later, followed by the double canoes in which the great voyages from Central Polynesia to such extremities as Hawaii and New Zealand were made. Another chapter summarizes the great advances of recent years in anthropological and archaeological studies of the Pacific. At the heart of the book is a thorough examination of canoe seaworthiness. Doran's conclusions are that Austronesian canoes were amply seaworthy and fully capable of intentional voyages of discovery, and that previous views on the ages of canoe types are just the opposite of the probable sequence. Double canoes seem to be the oldest type; single-outrigger canoes probably were devised somewhat later; and much later, possibly only about 2,500 years ago, double outriggers were developed. Maps showing the distribution of canoe types, sail types, sailing techniques, and the like, illustrate these ideas.

In 1865 Walt Whitman was dismissed from his clerkship in the Department of the Interior because Secretary James Harlan judged Leaves of Grass indecent, unfit to be read aloud "by the evening lamp." Most eloquent among Whitman's defenders was William Douglas O'Connor, whose pamphlet The Good Gray Poet, a panegyric to Whitman and an attack on literary censorship in general and Harlan in particular, was the first of his many heroic if sometimes excessive efforts in Whitman's behalf. A gifted polemicist and a stout though not always judicious advocate of causes (he wrote several screeds favoring Bacon as the author of Shakespeare's works), O'Connor devoted much of his literary life to establishing Whitman and Leaves of Grass in the world of American letters. Whitman considered O'Connor his staunchest "literary believer and champion from the first and throughout . . . for twenty-five years," and indeed, despite a personal estrangement between the two men, O'Connor's support of Whitman the poet never wavered. O'Connor's own literary efforts may command little interest today, but his championship of Whitman as a great, original American poet rendered lasting service to literature. Appropriately, this study of his career is complemented by carefully annotated texts of six of his Whitman essays, including The Good Gray Poet. A complete O'Connor bibliography is also included.

"Arizona was, I knew, a land of cowboys and Indians, and both ranked high in my esteem. It was also where our father lived, and even though our mother had divorced him after he wandered off and didn't return, we knew he was somewhere in Arizona and always hoped he'd come and take us there." So writes Don Worcester, and for everyone else who ever dreamed of riding off to the West his tales will hold the poignancy and truth of that dream. Worcester, his brother and sister lived most of their childhoods with their grandparents on "the homestead" in the Southern California desert, scraping by during the Great Depression. Some seasons they joined their mother, who was creating an academic career as an astronomer. Those times with her--in Berkeley, Winter Park, Florida, or Poughkeepsie--were welcome respites in the hard routine of life. Most days, though, were spent on the homestead doing chores or at school. But there were horses. Some wild, some tame. All teasing with a freedom and a power that kept hope alive. There were friends, like A.P. Aldrich, the surrogate father who told the boys they could amount to something. There were escapades with brother Harris. And there was the day their father showed up at school--driving a powerful, shiny late-model car--for a half-hour visit. With understated narrative and vivid detail, Worcester spins tales of childhood and growing up between the two World Wars, of the West lived as both fact and myth, of family and loneliness. It is sprightly telling of a most human story, a nostalgic memoir of an unusual rite of passage, evoking times and places that today have reality only in the mythos of the American Dream.

The early luxury of free forage on unclaimed western public domain allowed the building of fortunes in cattle and sheep and offered opportunities to successive waves of settlement. But the western public lands could not last. The range became overgrazed, overstocked, overcrowded. Animals were lost, much range was irreversible damaged, and even violence occurred as cowmen, sheepmen, and settlers competed for the best forage. Congress intervened by designating the U.S. Forest Service as the pioneer grazing control agency. The Forest Service's controls represent not only attempts to protect a resource but also a social experiment designed to prevent the monopolization of rangelands by large outfits and to encourage small enterprises. The Forest Service has become the undisputed leader in bringing order, rationality, and economic use to the range resources under government supervision. The problems and continuing challenges of the task emerge in these pages.

This volume contains all the letters that passed between President Woodrow Wilson and his close confidant and adviser Herbert Hoover while the two were participating in the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War. Wilson headed the American delegation at that conference, and Hoover was Director General for Relief and Reconstruction of Europe. Their correspondence deals with some of the most important events of modern times; it also shows how policies are formed, how things are done in crises, and how men manipulate events and each other to attain great ends. The letters reveal Hoover's anxiety over the efforts of Communists to seize prostrate Austria, Germany, and Hungary, and they provide details of the abortive attempt by Hoover and Wilson to stop the civil war in Russia and to provide food for that starving nation. Wilson disagreed with Hoover's sharp criticism of the Versailles Treaty. Earlier they had been as one in their objection to the British and French food blockade and to Clemenceau's censorship of the Paris press, his intrigues to block the Russian food mission, and his attempts to dismember Germany. The book presents fresh insights into Hoover's views of the League of Nations and international cooperation in general. Professor O'Brien's introduction details the organization and procedure of the peace conference and underscores the herculean tasks of Wilson and Hoover as they confronted the complex problems of peacemaking. Short commentaries before individual letters clarify the particular problems under discussion.

From Sam Maverick's arrival in Texas to his death in 1870, he participated in many of the most momentous events of the state's early history, including the Siege of Bexar and the defense of the Alamo. He accumulated a fabled land empire and inspired the term "maverick" to denote an unbranded calf or an independent person. Sam's wife, Mary--by some accounts the first AngloAmerican woman to settle in San Antonio--lived through the stresses and tragedies of pioneer family life, chronicling them with emotional intensity and immediacy of detail. Together Sam and Mary founded a Texas family dynasty and contributed immeasurably to the cultural development of San Antonio. Using a profusion of letters, journals, and business materials as well as Mary Maverick's published Memoirs, the author culls the dramatic story of these two Texas forebears, whose public and private lives were played out against the backdrop of the Mexican nation, the Republic, and early statehood.

The glitter of gold attracted perhaps three hundred thousand people to California in the decade after 1848, including A. B. Clarke, an adventurous former schoolteacher and entrepreneur who took the less traveled path to California--through northern Mexico and the southwestern deserts. Clarke took daily notes of his journey. Printed in 1852, Clarke's journal describes in unpretentious prose the features of the land and people he passed. The outbreak of cholera and fear in Brownsville and the adobe huts and Mexican fortresses, Clarke sketches with ease. Clarke went West to seek a suitable site for a general store. He found such a place in Marysville and went into business. In 1851, while he was in Massachusetts on some business, a fire destroyed the town's business district, including his store. Clarke never went West again. Together, Clarke's journal and Anne Perry's notes provide an interesting look, from first-hand and analytical perspectives, at an important period in the West.

In a process called diffusion, people of any one culture may copy from those of another rather than constantly "reinventing" ideas and technologies. They copy things as diverse as pots, plants, plans, books, and automobiles; the techniques for constructing or replicating such artifacts; institutions, whether ecclesiastical, managerial, ceremonial, military, or economic; and ideas or complexes of ideas, including religious beliefs and political ideologies. In the process they transform these things, sometimes beyond recognition. How important, then, are these diffusion processes in determining the overall shape of cultures? Under what conditions do they operate? When will they be resisted? This volume offers exciting multidisciplinary perspectives on the questions of diffusionism and its critiques. Well-known scholars from the fields of geography, anthropology, and sociology consider the spread and modification of ideas and material culture over space and time.

In 1791 Great Britain faced the task of establishing diplomatic relations with its rebellious former colony, the United States. Tories and Democrats follows nine successive British emissaries to the fledgling nation from the years 1791 through 1823. In animated prose, William Masterson takes readers along on the diplomats' assignments, showing the acumen or blundering, the ease or annoyance with which they carried out their instructions in the peripatetic American capital, the one on the Potomac being considered particularly devoid of the physical necessities of life. Masterson's research into sources never before consulted, especially on the eastern side of the Atlantic, uncovers personal factors that may have affected the early political relations between the two countries. Excerpts of letters disclose the ambitions, domestic battles, and fashion consciousness of the striped-pants set through wars, dress balls, and torrid American summers.

The final curtain fell on the already dying age of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama in the late summer of 1642. Civil war broke out in England, and soon afterward the Puritan Parliament closed the theaters. Thus, any surviving play from the last years of the reign of Charles I is of interest for the insight it can provide into that little-known period in the history of drama. One such survivor is this play, until now an anonymous, titleless manuscript in British Museum MS. Egerton 1994. Because various titles given the play by its readers are neither apt nor accurate, Diane Strommer has retitled it Time's Distractions, which emphasizes its central action and uses a popular contemporary phrase that refers to the political disorder and conflict of the early 1640s.This play, for the most part theatrically competent and carefully conceived, has strangely received little attention although others of the fifteen plays in MS. Egerton 1994 have drawn notice and have been published. The author of Time's Distractions remains unknown although attempts have been made to trace him. Various references in the play indicate that its date of composition was sometime between September, 1642, and August, 1643, but a more precise date is impossible to obtain. In her thorough, detailed introductory analysis, Diane Strommer examines these and other problems raised by the play: its origins; its relationship to the contemporary dramatic styles of masque, morality play, allegory, and pastoral; its possible technique of performance; and its sources and analogues.

The political and military upheaval of 1836 in Texas left Catholics north of the Nueces River cut off from the ordinary ties binding them to the institutions of the church and ushered in an era of reorganization, evangelization, and change unprecedented in the North American Catholic church. James Talmadge Moore engagingly chronicles the history of the Catholic church in Texas from the point at which Carlos E. Castañeda ended his celebrated account up to the present century. Moore deftly integrates local and regional events after the Texas Revolution into the larger social and political history of the young nation and state and shows their relationship to ecclesiastical and philosophical movements in the United States and abroad. He traces the contributions of various religious orders--as missionaries and in establishing schools and hospitals--and shows the evolving institutional complexity of the church as the number of Catholics in Texas grew. Moreover, he shows the character of the people who did the work of the church--many different kinds of people, some courageous and compassionate, others less admirable. All, he concludes, were united in their effort to live their faith in an unquiet age, an age filled with the incessant motion of unprecedented political and demographic change. With full access to the Catholic Archives of Texas as well as other archival and primary sources and supplementing these amply with secondary literature, Moore has given a full and extremely readable account of the various facets of this important part of the state's religious and socio-political life. Scholars of religious history, Western and Southwestern studies, and Texas history will find it a solid corpus of information, while those with more general interests will enjoy the lively description of the church, the times, and the people who made them what they were in Texas.

When D Burns arrived at the mighty Pitchfork Ranch as the new manager in 1942, he walked straight into the hostility of a lot of longtime hands who did not want to take orders from an outsider. Gradually, though, D and his wife, Mamie, won allies and made a place for themselves on the historic spread. For the next twenty-three years Mamie jotted down stories about the cowhands, the cooks and gardeners at the Big House, the many guests, and her own lively family. Her stories reveal life as it was on an isolated ranch during the war years and the years of change that followed. The Pitchfork is one of Texas' largest and oldest ranches, eighty miles east of Lubbock and a hundred miles north of Abilene. Mamie's reminiscences about life there with her husband, her grandchildren, and the many hired hands needed to run such a spread portray the exuberant informality of chuck-house meals, the color of Christmas dances, and the Forks' grand tradition of hospitality. "My book is about the ranch people," she writes, "more than it is about the ranch's history, or its skunks and rattlesnakes."

In fact, all the stories in this collection are good'uns. Bill Brett has a fine ear for the ways of speech and a sharp eye for the way of life of the forests and swamps of the southeastern region of Texas. Some might say that the tone of many of these tales is more autobiographical than that of his earlier collection, There Ain't No Such Animal, and perhaps that's true, for in these stories he shows a keen understanding of what it was like for a boy growing up in the early decades of the twentieth century, passing into manhood, and accepting the responsibility that comes with maturity. But there are also stories here about such topics as the strains of married life, the hazards of an obsession for deer hunting, the drawbacks to being part of a family, and the foibles of politicians. In other words, Bill Brett writes with natural humor and perceptive wisdom about the way folks live through all their years. These stories will appeal to anyone who likes a well-told yarn about boys, dogs, horses, farmers, preachers, and the country life that was common to us all just a few generations ago.

The stories in this book are the kind you might hear sitting on the porch past dark listening to distant hounds after a fox in the southeast Texas bottoms, tales with some truth and some lies and much pleasure take in the telling and the listening, tales with a strong sense of place and people, rooted firmly in the oral tradition. Sure enough, there "ain't no such animal" as a completely honest man, as the title story shows. Other stories tell of justice as swift and sure as a mule's kick, of epic brawls and the trials of courtship, of poachers, politicians, and preachers, of hogs and dogs and horse traders, of good neighboring and bad blood, of life and death and youth and age in southeast Texas as it was early in the twentieth century. In the tradition of Frank Dobie and Fred Gipson, Bill Brett writes with the natural humor and wisdom of the folk themselves. His stories will delight anyone with an interest in folk life or with the inclination to stop and "set a spell" and listen to a good yarn.

For almost three hundred miles, the Pecos River cuts across far West Texas. It is an arid land, a land that in the last century offered danger and hardship to those who crossed it and those who settled it. Yet they came--army posts like Fort Stockton to challenge the Apaches' claim to the rugged land, settlers to supply the posts, cattlemen to eke out a living from the vast but sparse grazing ranges. They came and they stayed because the land held one overriding appeal: it was Texas' last frontier. The newcomers--cattlemen and sheepmen, individuals and corporations--included sturdy, law-abiding, industrious citizens, such as O.W. Williams, a renowned surveyor, jurist, and historian with a law degree from Harvard; Mexicans, both poor laborers and well-to-do entrepreneurs; kindly German merchants; fighting Irishmen; and fearless Anglo cowboys. There were also the gunslingers, including Sheriff A.J. Royal, who terrorized the citizenry, even after Texas Rangers had arrived, until he was mysteriously shot to death one afternoon, possibly by one of the town's leading men. The most detailed and thorough account available of the history of far West Texas, this tale is colored with human interest and drama. It will prove invaluable to scholars and richly rewarding to all those interested in the history of Texas and of the West.