Bücher veröffentlicht von Texas A & M University Press

The Plains Cooperative Oil Mill in Lubbock was organized in 1937 to process and market cottonseed oil on a cooperative basis. With annual sales in 1999 averaging 150 million dollars, the Plains mill is now a trendsetter in the cottonseed industry, processing on average 600,000 tons of cottonseed a year-approximately 15 percent of the cottonseed processed in the United States. Since its inception the Plains mill has returned millions of dollars to its patrons, removed the "Dallas differential," which in the early days penalized Plains producers at the marketplace, and actively encouraged the development of other cooperative activities in the area. Its influence, direct and indirect, on Plains agriculture has been incalculable. Despite the farsighted assistance of the Houston Bank for Cooperatives, the Plains mill, faced with inadequate capital, losses in membership, and obsolete facilities, got off to an uncertain start. But in 1943 new manager Roy Davis saw that extensive irrigation would soon revolutionize cotton production, and under his imaginative and innovative guidance the Plains mill became the largest and one of the most successful cottonseed oil mills in the world. A recent venture into milling sunflower seed brought near disaster when the market dropped far below the mill's guaranteed payment, but courageous support by the gins and the Houston Bank for Cooperatives brought the Plains mill back to successful operation. This lively insider's look at the Plains mill, written by a former president of the Houston bank, dramatically demonstrates the importance of adequate capital, sound management principles, membership support, and a sympathetic lending institution in the development of a cooperative enterprise.

By the end of the nineteenth century the cattle industry in northern Mexico was thriving. Large haciendas, based on the peonage system and many of them foreign-owned, produced hundreds of thousands of head of cattle that enriched hacendados and filled ranges in both Mexico and the United States. But the Revolution of 1910 overturned Mexico's social and economic structure, and by the 1920s large holdings were being broken up and almost 70 percent of the vast herds were gone. Machado examines the devastation of the revolutionary period, when herds were slaughtered to feed armies or appropriated for sale to finance arms and munitions; the slow climb back after the Revolution when changes in land tenure and limits on herd size made reinvestment risky; and more recent problems with disease control, which required and eventually received cooperation between Mexico and the United States. The conflicts and compromises between agrarian radicalism and the basic conservatism of the norteño cattle industry, between institutionalizing reform and independent enterprise, and between Mexican nationalism and close economic ties with the United States are thoughtfully delineated.

Years before pesticides and other pollutants began to endanger species, humans had no trouble finding less sophisticated ways of endangering wildlife. When the twentieth century had barely begun, the passenger pigeons had been slain to the last and the American bison had been hunted to the brink of extinction. Love of and concern for nature called people like Florence Merriam Bailey to action. Bailey was one of the first to study live birds in their natural environment instead of studying specimens that had been shot and brought into a laboratory. She was the first woman to be an associate member of the American Ornithologists' Union, and for fifty years, with her husband Vernon Bailey, chief naturalist for the U.S. Biological Survey, she spent summers in the West and Southwest observing birds and making field notes, often from the back of a horse or mule. Harriet Kofalk has chronicled Florence Merriam Bailey's life, with Florence's sixtyyear correspondence with her brother, Hart, as a major source. Numerous excerpts from her ten books and more than one hundred articles are included, all describing joyfully the pleasures of studying live birds.

These eight tales of mystery and the supernatural feature sorcerers, the Grim Reaper in a horse-drawn coach, a beguiling bird of death, a long-dead saint turned devil, and a whole retinue of creatures of the night. Claude Seignolle, distinguished French ethnographer and folklorist and author of more than twenty-three volumes of short stories and novels, is a master of the "rustic" tale, which depicts folklore and popular traditions of the French countryside. He incarnates Satan as an entity sharing human traits, an evil spirit who identifies himself with human suffering. Seignolle's Gothic stories are not meant merely to terrorize, however; they are intended to revive an oral tradition in danger of becoming extinct. These vignettes, selected and translated into English by Eric H. Deudon, are charged with poetry and mystery; as Lawrence Durrell notes in his foreword, they are strong, truthful, and intense. Seignolle brings to life the wealth of popular legend; by intertwining the boundaries of the real and the supernatural, he reveals that the least conspicuous or most ordinary objects of everyday life can possess unexpected and formidable dimensions. Claude Seignolle's fiction works have been translated into eight languages and adapted for both theater and cinema. These stories will delight anyone who enjoys Gothic tales and the enchanted territory of the fantastic.

In July, 1921, Peter Hurd was a West Point plebe with dreams of a military destiny. But by the spring of 1924, the young man from Roswell, New Mexico, had abandoned the army as a career and was studying painting in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, under N. C. Wyeth. The experiences that led Hurd to art, and ultimately to fame as a painter of the Southwest, are candidly revealed in this comprehensive autobiographical collection of Hurd's letters and journals. Introduced by Paul Horgan, award-winning novelist, historian, and biographer and lifelong friend of Hurd, the book spans fifty years of Hurd's life. Beginning with his cadet days at the U.S. Military Academy, the letters trace his apprenticeship under Wyeth; his romance with Henriette, Wyeth's daughter; the Hurds' family life in both Pennsylvania and New Mexico; Hurd's passionate love for the Southwest; his friendships with other artists and writers; his various painting techniques; and his philosophy of art. "My credo is a simple one," Hurd once wrote. "It is to live just as intensely as possible, to keep my perceptions at a peak of sensitivity, and to try to realize to the fullest every moment of consciousness." The story of one of America's premier realist painters will fascinate those interested in the creative arts as well as anyone who savors clear and eloquent prose.

Drawing on numerous diaries, journals, and reminiscences, Richard Bruce Winders presents the daily life of soldiers at war; links the army to the society that produced it; shares his impressions of the soldiers he "met" along the way; and concludes that American participants in the Mexican War shared a common experiemce, no matter their rank or place of service. In addition to the soldiers' mundane complaints--bad food, hard marches, and long periods of incredible boredom--Winders discovers a political awareness among the soldiers that, with some, led to displaying their political affiliations while in uniform. Taking a "new" military history approach, Mr. Polk's Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War examines the cultural, social, and political aspects of the regular and volunteer forces that made up the army of 1846-48, presents the organizational framework of the army, and introduces the different styles of leadership exhibited by Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. Historians and those interested in the Mexican War and its participants will find this an important addition to nineteenth-century military history.

Entranced by visions of instant wealth, the fabled prospector and his trusty burro combed the hills of the Rocky Mountain West for that one huge deposit of pay ore. Close behind the prospector--and drawn by the same vision--came the speculator. Capital, a scarce though essential commodity on the frontier, was supplied by the speculators and made possible the development of a hardrock mining industry that helped shape the early history of the region. Between the Civil War and the turn of the century, the gold and silver mines of Colorado were a gaudy, unsavory, but important element in the American financial scene and in the economic history of the West. Joseph E. King, drawing upon contemporary sources, provides the first comprehensive and scholarly examination of eastern investors in Colorado and challenges the popular notion that eastern investors did little more than exploit the mines of Colorado. Not surprisingly, the prospector and the lusty boom towns he visited have often captivated the imagination of historians at the expense of the later stages in the development of a mineral industry. Professor King stresses the contributions of promoters, businessmen, and mining engineers in the development of the "Wild West."

During World War II, the U.S. Army Finance Department disbursed approximately $176 billion. To fulfill that task Finance had to coordinate activities with foreign governments as well as other branches of the U.S. government and military branches. The department's first priority was paying the troops, but payments to contractors, vendors, and native laborers were also important. War caught the Finance Department unprepared. Its procedures, designed for a stationary organization in peacetime, were applied without adaptation to a highly mobile wartime operation. A routine assignment such as paying troops became immensely difficult with troops scattered over large areas. Even the best efforts of personnel could not prevent lapses in service under such conditions, and fiscal administration could never keep pace with tactical innovations. This is the first study of this important topic and the first critical analysis of the army's use of unsuitable procedures and its lack of planning to cope with the extraordinary fiscal problems presented by World War II. The book points out the need for a realistic appraisal of the army's fiscal obligations during combat and an accompanying change in procedures.

The story of Rijnland, a small strip of coastal lowland in the western Netherlands, is part of the legendary Dutch struggle against encroaching water. Rijnland was for centuries a stretch of uninhabited peat bogs and sand dunes. The reclamation and colonization processes that eventually transformed these remote marshes into a commercialized agricultural center form the heart of this book, which chronicles events from A.D. 950 to 1350. Unlike most studies of the European Middle Ages, this work focuses on how people of earlier times dealt with their physical environment. Combining historical and archaeological research techniques, William TeBrake reconstructs the world of tenth-century Rijnland, at that time one of the most underpopulated and underdeveloped parts of Europe. The author shows how, by reclaiming and colonizing the bogs, its residents gradually turned a frontier wilderness along the North Sea into a highly productive agrarian landscape. With its new approach to understanding medieval subsistence strategy, this book will be particularly useful to historical geographers and environmental historians. Its themes of land reclamation, colonization, and the continuing struggle between man and nature will provide fresh insights into life in medieval Europe.

Son of a north Texas wheat- and cotton-farming family, Marvin Jones grew up with strong agrarian roots and a taste for Democratic politics. Elected to Congress in 1916, he joined the Texas delegation and learned the political ropes from John Nance Garner. Named to the House Agriculture Committee, Jones later became its chairman and directed the destiny of New Deal agricultural legislation in the House of Representatives. Jones's Panhandle district lay in the 1930s Dust Bowl. As Roosevelt's chairman of the Agriculture Committee, he fought for New Deal farm legislation--low-interest loans and mortgages for farmers, soil conservation, farm subsidies, agricultural research, and new markets for farm products. Many of today's federal agricultural policies were born in his committee room. As war food administrator in World War II, Jones put his knowledge and experience to use in balancing U.S. agricultural production with military and civilian food requirements. At war's end he accepted a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Claims and later became chief judge, noted for just, compassionate decisions couched in everyman's language. Jones was a gentle, hard-working man, a realist who extolled the rural life but accepted the urbanization of America. More reserved than his mentor, Garner, less shrewd than his good friend Sam Rayburn, Jones probably surpassed them both in terms of real achievement. Using archival sources and Jones's memoirs as well as his own numerous interviews with Judge Jones, Irvin May provides a solid account of this transplanted Texan who remained the farmer's advocate throughout his life.

For years the logging industry and the rich timberlands of the East and West coasts have evoked images of Jigger Jones and Paul Bunyan, lusty lumbermen of folk history. Behind these myths, however, lie the realities of ruthless competition, heedless exploitation of forestlands, and massive overproduction that once threatened to destroy the lumber industry. William G. Robbins reveals a sharply revisionist view of the lumber industry in the first half of the twentieth century, a period of drastic growth and change. He offers a unique national perspective on the dominant figures in logging--the large-scale plant, mill, and timberland owners whose decisions were shaped by profit seeking. It is a story of unbalanced production, economic gains and losses, the slow maturation of industrial capitalism, and the alarming toll in social and human costs. Modernizers in the industry developed trade associations as a means of controlling the widespread disorder. But these associations, dependent of voluntary and cooperative efforts, were relatively ineffective in the early years of the twentieth century. The fortunes of the lumber industry continued to fluctuate wildly until the Second World War, when lumbermen gained much of the legislative support they had sought so long from the federal government. This account will especially appeal to students of lumber and forest history as well as to historians, political scientists, and economists seeking a new approach to American political economy.

"I want to hear about such folks as my father and how he knows how to make cement, not by recipe, but by something in his bones. I want to hear how my grandfather learned to plow a straight furrow and why even older men always called him Mister. I want to know all of the reasons why, those years ago, my mother cried when the tomatoes in her garden twisted and died." Trying to find out such things, Jim Corder leads us through the ravines of the Croton Breaks, around to the back side of the Double Mountains, and through the streets of Jayton and Spur, as they are and as they used to be. He takes us right up to gaze at the Big Rock Candy Mountain, which, however, he can't tell us how to find since the day in 1937 when the State Highway Department made it into gravel. Fort Concho and Fort Phantom Hill, outhouses and feed mills, Col. Ranald Mackenzie and a lone Comanche brave, high school athletes and desperately lonely teachers, all come under his scrutiny and are hauntingly considered for their stories, their limitations, and the sense of place they afford. Nostalgia, wonderment, and a healthy and imaginative provincialism color the pages of this book, which is well illustrated with the author's own pen-and-ink sketches of the places and things he remembers. The vibrantly concrete details of daily existence in a bygone time in a remote and desolate area of Texas are startlingly juxtaposed with philosophical musings about the limitations all of us face in comprehending even that little bit of life we live. "Can poetry, or water, be found in West Texas?" Corder asks at one point. His answer--if such it be--makes it worth our getting lost with him in this journey of the heart and mind.

The 344 days of combat of the 88th Infantry Division were part of the bitterly contested struggle for supremacy in Italy during the Second World War. Here is the gripping story of the first selective service division committed to battle in the European Theater, seen from the unique vantage point of a battalion physician. Using notes hastily scribbled on the backs of maps and finished out whenever he was rotated to rear areas for rest, Dr. Klaus Huebner captured in his diary the frustration, fear, boredom, devotion, and anger that were the daily portion of combat infantrymen. The result is a remarkably sustained exposition of combat life. Dr. Huebner traces the 88th's activities from final staging preparations at Fort Sam Houston to North Africa and on up the Italian peninsula to the Brenner Pass in Austria, just fifty-five miles south of the Bavarian hamlet where he was born. Combat began for the Division just north of Naples, Italy. During combat, the medical aid station was set up in any available farmhouse, barn, cave, or clump of trees that offered some protection for treating the wounded. There the battalion surgeon and his aides did what they could under adverse circumstances, gave by their presence alone moral support to the casualties, and came to know well the miseries, emotions, and human drama of infantry soldiers in combat. Dr. Huebner writes: "I walked with the men who carried guns and slugged it out on foot. I treated the wounded where they fell." His story is terse and often tense, a memorable view of battle and the men who tried to heal its wounds right in the field

From the time a press first reached Texas in 1813 until the Civil War, some four hundred newspapers appeared to chronicle the development of a nation. An annotated checklist of Texas papers from annexation to the Civil War makes this an invaluable reference work, while the drama of the subject make it an enthralling tale.

From an endangered species of prickly pear cactus to a daisy and even a snake, the name Lindheimer is tied to the nomenclature of Texas natives in nature. The name originally belonged to Ferdinand Lindheimer, one of the Southwest's first serious scientists, who came to be known as the "Father of Texas Botany." This immigrant from Frankfurt, Germany, spent more than a decade living on a shoestring budget as he searched the wilds of Central and Southeast Texas for new species. His correspondent, friend, fellow botanist, and fellow Frankfurt native was George Engelmann, who also served as Lindheimer's conduit to civilization and to botanic circles worldwide. Like Lindheimer in the tangled prairies, Minetta Altgelt Goyne spent more than a decade on a difficult task: deciphering and translating more than forty of Lindheimer's letters, contained in the Engelmann Papers at the Missouri Botanical Garden archives. Goyne's biographical research and annotations make Lindheimer's letters a fascinating window on his excitement in discovering new species and oddities and his frustrations with immigration politics and frontier life. His comments in his letters to Engelmann about the personalities and practices of the Texas German immigrants and their leaders are at times witty and biting. His wealth of experiences and pointed observations make this a story that will intrigue botanists, Germanists, historians, and Texans everywhere.

Three centuries after the French explorer La Salle was murdered in the Texas wilds, this volume presents translations of three obscure documents that broaden the view of the man and his exploits. The first non-Spanish effort to settle areas along the Gulf of Mexico is seen from the perspectives of La Salle's engineer; a Spanish pilot who searched for the French colony; and two French lads who, orphaned as a result of the Fort Saint-Louis massacre, lived first among the Texas Indians, then the Spaniards. The engineer Minet relates both La Salle's 1682 exploration of the Mississippi River and his 1685 voyage to the Gulf of Mexico, from which Minet himself returned to France and prison rather than share the fate of the colonists. The pilot Juan Enríquez Barroto recounts the Spaniards' 1687 circumnavigation of the Gulf, the finding of La Salle's wrecked ships, and the first close examination of Texas and Louisiana bays and rivers, including the Mississippi passes. Among the few survivors of La Salle's venture, the two Talon brothers returned to France as adults to give information that was vital to a new undertaking, Iberville's Mississippi colony. In an unparalleled adventure narrative and exploration account, they describe the land, its flora and fauna, and the natives' lives and languages--data of incalculable historical value. From all three documents, significant sidelights emerge: Minet's description of the English colony of Jamestown, Enríquez's finding of Spanish castaways among the Atákapa Indians, and the Talons' description of life in seventeenth-century Mexico. With careful scholarly attention--historical introductions, annotation, and commentaries by noted authorities--the documents emphasize the tendency of modern observers to ascribe to La Salle a knowledge of geography that simply was not possible in his time. They lead the editors to a somewhat surprising conclusion about why the vaunted explorer landed in Texas when he was seeking the Mississippi.

Friedrich A. Hayek, distinguished scholar and Nobel laureate, has long been recognized as the moral and intellectual spokesman for classic liberalism and a free society. In January, 1976, a conference on the University of San Francisco campus convened to explore the implications of Hayek's legal and political philosophy. From that conference Robert L. Cunningham has selected the best papers for presentation in this book. Three of the participants, Joseph Raz, William Letwin, and Gottfried Dietze, discuss the values represented by the rule of law. Raz analyzes the ideal of the rule of law as elaborated by Hayek and others and shows why certain conclusions drawn from it cannot be supported. Letwin examines in detail the relationship of the rule of law to a particular set of decisions of the U.S. courts. Dietze discusses the legitimate role legislation plays in the liberal state. The concept of privacy and its relationship to the law is discussed by George Fletcher and Walter Berns, but from quite different viewpoints. The former deals with the role of privacy in a legal system, the latter with privacy as a right. Stephen J. Tonsor examines the conservative origins of collectivism. The philosophical foundations of Hayek's political and legal theory are analyzed by Eugene F. Miller and Tibor R. Machan. And finally Robert L. Cunningham considers how mankind's limited knowledge can be put to best use in a rapidly changing world. The volume concludes with a brief discussion generated by the various papers.

When young Kirvin Kade Legett arrived in Buffalo Gap, Texas, in 1879, his principal assets were a good horse and saddle and a license to practice law. When the Texas and Pacific Railroad, building west from Fort Worth, missed Buffalo Gap, the young attorney moved on to Abilene, then a tent city with only two items for sale, "a train ticket to git away or a drink to make you willing to stay." The man and the country were to grow up together.Legett's early clients were buffalo hunters, bone collectors, sheepherders, cattlemen, and farmers, but he eventually handled cases of statewide and even out-of-state importance. Although he refused to seek public office, he had some say about those who did, and most serious candidates for state offices sought his counsel and support. A stock farmer and rancher as well as practicing attorney, Legett was a forceful early advocate of farm diversification and did much to further the development of West Texas agriculture, business, oil exploration, and education. Judge Legett was a pioneer and a man of stature; his life story is, in a real sense, an epitome of the history of West Texas, especially of the Abilene area. By the time of Legett's death, that rowdy railroad town had become a thriving, modern city. Vernon Gladden Spence's biography, based on an extensive collection of private papers, offers a clear and detailed portrait of a man whose energies and talents helped turn a wilderness into a habitable and productive country.

Travel between southwestern towns at the turn of the century was an arduous experience. There were no longer any stagecoaches to carry travelers. Railroads did criss-cross the region, but they did not go through every burg. Motor cars were appearing, but not everyone could afford them. W. B. Chenoweth saw this void in transportation service. He designed a six-cylinder "motor driven stage coach," and in 1907 he coaxed a few passengers into the vehicle for a trip from Colorado City to Snyder, Texas. As soon as passengers became used to Chenoweth's noisy coaches, the dusty paths, and, most important, the quicker trips, motor-coach wildcatters began to crop up across the Southwest. Bus companies grew, merged, and absorbed smaller companies. Author Jack Rhodes has interviewed dozens of owners, executives, drivers, and ticket agents in his research for this book. Those interested in business history or the cultural elements of the era's buses, represented here in dozens of period photographs, will find this an engaging read.

The subjects of Craig Clifford's ruminations range from Willie Nelson to Walter Prescott Webb, from German philosophers to an Irish immigrant out to save the American West, and in them Clifford voices the concerns of a new generation of Texans and other earthlings. Deep-hearted Texas expatriates, well-rooted transplants, natives, and brand-new Texans alike will have an almost tactile encounter with the feeling of what it means to be a Texan in this age in which freeway, microchip, and shopping mall have replaced Chisholm Trail, lariat, and trading post. Together with the author, readers can come to grips with the meaning of Texas and Texanness, and by the way of these personal and provincial reflections, with the role that rootedness and uprootedness play in the lives of all humans.

Popular history has not venerated Eduard Harkort as a hero of either Santa Anna's 1832 uprising in Mexico or the Texas Revolution against the revolutionary-turned-dictator. The journal of Harkort, a middle-class German mining engineer, recorded during his two years of fighting and imprisonment in Mexico, reveals the activities and feelings of a brave and multitalented man who withdrew from nineteenth-century corporate life and ultimately found himself in battle, before a firing squad, and in prison. First published in Germany in 1858 by Harkort's son-in-law, the journal of Eduard Harkort has now been translated and annotated by Louis E. Brister. In Brister's introduction, the journal itself, and Harkort's letters to friends, readers can sense the harrowing experiences faced by Harkort, who had training in the Prussian army, during his adventures with the ragtag rebel army of Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna. Thoroughly documented, this self-told tale of a foreigner's adventures in the turbulent history of Mexico will capture the imagination of the reader and intrigue the scholar.

As war spread across the world at the end of 1941, the Soviet Union found itself between a rock known as Nazi Germany and a hard place called imperial Japan. With all its forces battling Germany in the west, the Soviet Union had to keep peace on its isolated and vulnerable eastern borders. To avoid risking its status as a neutral country in the war between the United States and Japan, the Soviet Union interned many American flyers who crashed or made emergency landings in Soviet territory after bombing Japanese targets. This is the long-secret and nearly forgotten story of how the Soviet commissariat for internal affairs interned 291 young Americans in Siberia and, at the risk of war on a second front, eventually smuggled four groups of them to south central Asia and finally across the Iranian border. Official U.S. military records of the internments are impersonal and sketchy. To tell the story in its entirety, Otis Hays, Jr., sought out surviving airmen and found some who had smuggled rudimentary diaries out of the Soviet Union and helped piece together the tale.

Rice is a staple food for a majority of the world's people. Americans, however, traditionally have consumed corn and potatoes rather than rice. It thus may come as a surprise to some Americans that rice has been produced in America for more than three centuries and during that time has accounted for much of the world's trade. Most rice is consumed where it is produced, with little entering foreign markets. American rice has been primarily a product for the international export trade, but changing technology and political environments at home and abroad have made it a volatile commodity. Henry C. Dethloff has researched many original manuscript documents to gather the history of this American agribusiness that got its start when a British sea captain brought seed from Madagascar to the Carolinas in 1685. Plantations developed, and planters with resources for the complicated, labor-intensive production of rice made it the number-two colonial export cash crop. Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, California, and Mississippi eventually became the primary rice-growing states, and new plant varieties, further mechanization of farming, and improved pumping and irrigation systems reinvigorated the industry at the turn of the century. In the twentieth century, the rice industry is even more tied to the political vagaries of the world and its markets than before. Events in foreign countries, trade policies, and the federal government's foreign policy have more impact on the industry than the weather in the rice fields.

With 523 species of native, introduced, and adventive grasses, Texas has by far the most diverse grass flora of any of the fifty states. Gould's full and systematic treatment of Texas grasses is the definitive guide to this vast and complex subject. Over the past few decades, research in grass anatomy, cytology, reproduction, distribution, and ecological relationships, together with better international communication among the grassland-oriented nations, has brought many changes in the accepted names of U.S. grass species. Dr. Gould's classification of Texas grasses reflects both modern advances in the understanding of phylogenetic relationships and the current decline of provincialism in the selection of grass names. Presented here are keys to and botanical descriptions of all grasses in Texas that grow regularly or occasionally out of cultivation. Supplementing the botanical descriptions are 328 line drawings, including a map of Texas' ten vegetational areas, and three photographs. Also included are a listing of the subfamilies, tribes, genera, and species of Texas grasses, an introductory review of the parts of the grass plant, a glossary of botanical terms, a listing of references cited, and an index to both scientific and common plant names. The book is intended to serve both the professional botanist and researcher and the rancher or naturalist with little or no special training in plant classification.

When the colorful western prospectors had made their strikes and moved on, they left behind them another, lesser known breed of men, the hard-rock miners. For six decades these working stiffs followed mining opportunities into the boom towns of the intermountain West and gouged from the depths other men's wealth. In mines ranging from glorified prospect holes to underground extractories, they picked and blasted, sometimes in shifts of twelve hours, not only ore and minerals but also lung-destroying dust. Working by candle light in the ill-ventilated, narrow, and often sweltering depths, they courted dangers from fire, gas, subterranean water, and cave-ins. Management's interest in high productivity and profits often jeopardized miners' needs for a living wage and job security. Some miners retaliated by high-grading, or stealing their bosses' ore, for the old miners' maxim told them "gold belongs to him wot finds it." Above ground they lived in communities like Cripple Creek, Goldfield, Bisbee, and Leadville, communities that were western and yet urban. There they faced the rigors of a rugged climate, frontier scarcities, and ramshackle housing. But they relieved their hardships with their own brands of entertainment: rock-drilling contests that were to the miner what rodeos were to the cowboy; practical jokes like shivarees, snipe hunts, and social gatherings, picnics, and special celebrations. Drawing extensively on contemporary sources, Ronald C. Brown provides the first thorough study of the daily lives and work of hard-rock miners of Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and Nevada in the period 1860 to 1920. He carefully documents his argument that, though it initially made mining more dangerous, ongoing industrialization benefited miners by opening more jobs and, in the long run, by eliminating preindustrial dangers.

The architecture of an area reflects and indeed embodies its history. When a significant portion of that architecture is lost, so is the grasp later generations have on their heritage. With more than 250 historical photographs and drawings and thoughtful commentary, Willard Robinson recaptures for Texans the cultural history of their state through the architecture that is gone. This handsome volume is unique in picturing comprehensively both public and private buildings and in illustrating the entire history of the state's architecture, unhindered by the difficulties of finding extant examples. It traces the architectural development of the state from Indian dwellings and Hispanic-colonial structures through the early twentieth century. It details the diverse influences on the built environment introduced by settlers from various origins--Germany, France, the Southeast United States. It shows how evolutions in technology and taste following the Civil War affected architecture, and it explores the Victorian splendor of the nineteenth century's era of elegance. Moreover, Robinson, relying heavily on primary sources, sets architectural trends in the context of the social, economic, and aesthetic forces that gave rise to them. His emphasis on the significance of lost architecture presents a powerful appeal for preservation of the important works that remain. Robinson has traveled widely through the state, visiting the sites of lost buildings, viewing remains, gathering photographs, and obtaining information. The result is a beautiful history of the architecture of Texas, from a perspective that might otherwise have been lost with the buildings.

Few events in history have received as much real-time exposure as the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Few dilemmas have perplexed peacekeepers and negotiators as has the victimization of Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. With the memories of the Jewish holocaust so freshly etched in people's memories, could such genocide have happened again? What catalysts vault nationalism across the threshold into inhumanity? In this compelling and thorough study, Norman Cigar sets out to prove that genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina is not simply the unintentional result of civil war nor the unfortunate by-product of rabid nationalism. Genocide is, he contends, the planned and direct consequence of conscious policy decisions taken by the Serbian establishment in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Its policies were carried out in a deliberate and systematic manner as part of a broader strategy intended to achieve a defined political objective--the creation of an expanded, ethnically pure Greater Serbia. Using testimony from congressional hearings, policy statements, interviews, and reports from the western and local media, the author describes a sinister policy of victimization that escalated from vilification to threats, then expulsion, torture, and killing. Cigar also takes the international community to task for its reluctance to act decisively and effectively. The longer the world did nothing concrete about Bosnia-Herzegovina, the more unlikely it became that the situation would be reversed, as the country was torn apart or its population scattered or killed. Genocide in Bosnia provides a detailed account of the historical events, actions, and practices that led to and legitimated genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It focuses attention not only on the horror of ethnic cleansing and the calculated strategy that allowed it to happen but also offers some interesting solutions to the problem. Cigar's book is important reading for anyone interested in the inherent violence of overzealous nationalism--from Rwanda to Afghanistan and anywhere else.