Bücher veröffentlicht von Texas A & M University Press

This second volume arising from the Frontiers in American Philosophy Conference held at Texas A&M University is "festive, celebrating the diversity of thought and influences in American philosophy," say its editors. In these thirty-six essays, there is no attempt to define an American ethos; in fact, the editors conclude that, even pragmatism, identified by Tocqueville as America's defining attribute, should not be described as a national philosophy. It is, as Gerard Deledalle notes in his essay, "the new universal philosophy, because it is the philosophy of experience and democracy that is any nation's `manifest destiny.'" These articles, by thoughtful scholars from North America and several European nations, look forward through the developments presently shaping philosophical inquiry in the United States and backward to the origins and plurality of the American intellectual heritage. Not a parochial or narrow perspective, the focus on American philosophy sharpens the dialogue that clarifies and explicates American thought in the context of a world community.

To push the edges of the known, to look at the accepted in novel ways, is indeed to stand at the frontiers of a field. In Frontiers in American Philosophy thirty-five contemporary scholars explore classical American thought in bold new ways. An extraordinary range of issues and thinkers is represented in these pages--from such core themes as metaphysics and social philosophy, which receive primary attention, to some consideration of American philosophers' technical accomplishments in mathematical logic and philosophical analysis. The authors also offer new perspectives on the work of the leading American philosophers, including George Herbert Mead, William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Emma Goldman. Not surprisingly perhaps, a great deal of the discussion revolves, either directly or indirectly, around that great axis of intellectual issues commonly known as the "realism/idealism" controversy. It seems fitting that so much attention is devoted to the possibility of some sort of middle position between "external realism" and its antipode in some form of relativistic subjectivism. For, in the last analysis, such a middle position is for the American philosophers the core meaning of "pragmatism."

Though written by an economist, this book's subject is not "economics" in the ordinary sense of that term. Instead, it is James Buchanan's contribution to what he has called the "contractarian revival," the renewed interest in and emphasis on the metaphor of the social contract in evaluating political alternatives. He believes that genuine constitutional dialogue must take place in this country if America is to remain a free society and that the perspectives of an economist are valuable in the discussion of basic issues of social philosophy. The author critically examines the basic alternatives for social order: anarchy, natural law, historical determinism, and revealed reason. He rejects each of these and opts instead for "freedom in constitutional contract." In this stance he is explicitly constructivist, holding the view that reform in constitutional-legal rules or institutions is possible. Reform or improvement in such rules is determined, however, by conceptual contractual agreement or consensus and not by external ethical norms. Further, the choice among alternative sets of rules, alternative "constitutions," is categorically distinguished from attempts to suggest policy norms within an existing set of rules. In developing his analysis, Buchanan critically analyzes recent contributions by John Rawls, Robert Nozick, F. A. Hayek, Michael Polanyi, Frank H. Knight, and other social philosophers

Drawing on rare US Air Force files, recently declassified documents from the National Archives, records released since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the memories of airlift veterans themselves, Roger G. Miller provides an original study of the Berlin Airlift.

The ten chapters of this volume, by presidential scholars Jeffrey Tulis, Glen E. Thurow, Thomas W. Benson, Roderick P. Hart, Thomas Goodnight, and George Edwards, among others, offer analyses concerning the role of presidential rhetoric in passing policy, generating support, and promoting public discourse.

Readers brought up on Hollywood westerns will have their eyes opened by this story of a working cowboy. Although he never chased a rustler or rescued a pretty girl and probably couldn't even hire on as an extra in a B-grade western, Ed Alford (or "Fat") has worked cattle most of his life. Fred Gipson's vivid, earthy book about this cowhand, now in paperback, tells what the job is really like, the hardships, the hell-raising, and the sheer monotony of daily tasks.Fat Alford became a cowboy because he didn't think picking cotton was any way for a man to make a living. Although he may not have looked much like a cowboy and certainly started out green, he learned to rope a cow in an impenetrable brush, to break a mean horse, to get by with poor gear, worse food, and sorry mounts in freezing cold or blistering heat and still get the job done.Gipson's warm and rousing account captures the vivid reality of how it was and introduces us to a remarkable character--a working cowhand. This new paperback edition of Cowhand is sure to delight a whole new generation of readers.

A surprising number of Texans disagreed with their state's decision to secede from the Union in 1860. Most of them immigrants from Northern or Border states, many had settled in Cooke and surrounding counties in the years before the Civil War. Though they abided by the decision to secede, they disagreed openly with some of the Confederacy's laws, such as the rule exempting certain slave-owners from military service. James Lemuel Clark, eighteen at the outbreak of the Civil War, was the son of one of those men. These memoirs, which he wrote in his seventies, recount his involvement in a series of tragic events that typified the disruption and confusion of the Civil War years. Clark relates his experiences with the Texas militia in Indian campaigns and with the Confederate Army after he could no longer avoid service, but the key event in his memories is the Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, in October, 1862. In that affair more than forty men, including Clark's father and many of his neighbors, were executed for their Union sympathies. This book is a valuable addition to other contemporary accounts of the Great Hanging, but on a larger scale it affords a new view of life in Texas and in the Confederate armies during the Civil War and of many of the events that shaped that war's survivors and Reconstruction Texas.

In 1542 members of the thriving Caddo Indian culture came face to face with Luis de Moscoso, successor to Hernando de Soto as leader of a Spanish exploration party. That encounter marked a turning point for this centuries-old people, whose history from then on would be dominated by the interaction of the native confederacies with the empires of various European adventurers and settlers.Much has been written about the confrontations of Euro-Americans with Native Americans, but most of it has focused on the Anglo-Indian relations of the eastern part of the continent or on the final phases of the western wars. This thorough and engaging history is the first to focus intensively on the Caddos of the Texas-Louisiana border area. Primarily from the perspective of the Caddos themselves, it traces the development and effect of relations over the three hundred years from the first meeting with the Spaniards until the resettlement of the tribes on the Brazos Reserve in 1854.In an impressive work of scholarship and lucid writing, F. Todd Smith chronicles all three of the Caddo confederacies-Kadohadacho, Hasinai, and Natchitoches-as they consolidated into a single tribe to face the waves of soldiers, traders, and settlers from the empires of Spain, France, the United States, Mexico, and the Republic of Texas. It describes the delicate balance the Caddos struck with the various nations claiming the region and how that gradually evolved into a less beneficial relationship. Caught in the squeeze between Euro-American nations, the Caddos eventually sacrificed their independence and much of their culture to gain the benefits offered by the invaders. Falling victim to swindlers, they at last lost their lands and were moved to a reservation. This intriguing new view of a little-known aspect of history will fascinate those interested in the culture and fate of American Indians. Thorough in its research and comprehensive in scope, it offers valuable insight into the differing approaches of the various European and American nations to the native peoples and a compelling understanding of the futility of the efforts of even some of the most sophisticated tribes in coping successfully with the changes wrought.

For more than a century the Houston area has grown steadily and at times spectacularly. The lifeblood of the region's development has been the flow of credit; its heart, the banks that have pumped investment dollars through the economy, and particularly Texas Commerce Bank, one of the city's largest. From the chartering of Texas Commerce's first predecessor in 1886, the bank's ancestor institutions helped finance the growth of the region's lumber, cotton, and oil industries and played important roles in Houston's civic life. One of them, the National Bank of Commerce, was long controlled by Jesse Jones, secretary of commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under President Franklin Roosevelt and one of the fathers of modern Houston. In recent decades Texas Commerce again received considerable publicity as one of the fastest growing and most profitable banks in the nation. Since the early 1970s, it acquired more than seventy subsidiary banks throughout Texas and the region. In their research the authors had complete access to bank records and to current and retired bank officers. The balanced, readable result will fascinate bankers, investors, economic and business historians, and others interested in the economic development of a state region.

On a few sandy acres in the middle of the harsh, wild prairie of South Texas, young Helen Sewell grew to adulthood, as hardy and tenacious as the brush that grew around her. This is her story. In 1908, at the age of eleven, Helen moved with her family to what would later become Jim Hogg County. Shaped by her rugged environment, she worked with her father in the field doing a man's work for three years, without benefit of schools, churches, or medical attention. Then, filled with desire for an education, she began to acquire an unorthodox, haphazard one that eventually led to college. She tutored children, taught school for a time, and served as county/district clerk. Then she met and married Texas Ranger, later sheriff, Pell Harbison. On the ranch they bought near Hebbronville, they raised six children and shared a life of challenge, growth, and stubborn hard work. After her husband's death, Helen Harbison herself ran the ranch for thirty more years. Holland provides an accurate picture of life in South Texas in the first half of this century and a fascinating portrait of a woman of the Texas brush who was determined, independent, and capable in an age when women were not expected to be.

Wave upon wave of newcomers has penetrated the semiarid plains of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Among the settlers and sojourners along the Rio Grande in the mid-eighteenth century were the founders of Laredo, who came seeking survival and permanence in that chaparral country. Established in 1755 as an outpost of New Spain, Laredo, like other borderlands towns, has periodically been buffeted by powerful outside forces that upset the stable society and family unity characteristic of the early villa. Unlike some other border communities, though, it has maintained a prominent Mexican-American political and economic elite. Applying quantitative techniques of demographic analysis and interweaving their results with more traditional narrative, Gilberto Miguel Hinojosa tells the story of a borderlands town and its people. He shows how larger events such as war, economic depression, and changes of sovereignty affected family structure, racial and ethnic divisions, social-class relations, age composition of the population, property ownership, literacy, and other aspects of the daily lives of the townspeople. His conclusions suggest that life in these communities was far from the static, uneventful existence it was once believed to be.

An innovative contribution to the growing body of research about urban African-American culture in the South, Black Dixie is the first anthology to track the black experience in a single southern city across the entire slavery/post-slavery continuum. It combines the best previously published scholarship about black Houston and little-known contemporary eyewitness accounts of the city with fresh, unpublished essays by historians and social scientists. Divided into four sections, the book covers a broad range of both time and subjects. The first section analyzes the development of scholarly consciousness and interest in the history of black Houston; slavery in nineteenth-century Houston is covered in the second section; economic and social development in Houston in the era of segregation are looked at in the third section; and segregation, violence, and civil rights in twentieth-century Houston are dealt with in the final section. Collectively, the contents of Black Dixie utilize the full range of primary sources available to scholars studying the black South. These include such traditional material as newspapers and diaries as well as newer techniques involving quantification and statistical analysis. The editors' remarks relate the individual essays to one another as well as placing them within the context of scholarly literature on the subject. Hence Black Dixie will serve both as a resource and as a model for the study of black urban culture in Texas and throughout the South.

"In the first full-length biography of this important Texas statesman, Elizabeth Silverthorne portrays not only a very human and exciing personality but also the world he lived in, as seen through his eyes, and the part he played in shaping that world. Using public records, Smith's own journals, memoranda, and personal papers and the writings of his prominent contemporaries, she presents the tale of a vital, complex life 'so inextricably woven into the history of Texas ... that whenever we examine any of the burning issues of the day--finance, politics, religion, transportation, immigration, agriculture, warfare, medicine, or education--we find Ashbel Smith there, analyzing, expounding, crusading, searching for the truth to open the way to a better life' for Texans"--

In the last twenty years America's higher-education system has jeopardized our society's very future by allowing a serious decline in educational quality. Responding to modern egalitarianism and the need to attract students, colleges and universities have initiated wildly innovative programs, noncampuses, and nontraditional degrees. Worse, they have lowered all standards. Nonacademic entrepreneurs, attracted by generous federal funds, now demand equal status with established schools. And they are dangerously near receiving this full recognition from irresolute regional accrediting associations. From his vantage point as Texas' former Commissioner of Higher Education, Kenneth H. Ashworth sounds the alarm to all concerned administrators and teachers in American academia. He harshly criticizes the body-count game and relaxed standards, illustrating problems with vignettes from his own considerable experience. He then proposes to educators steps that would help break the cycle of declining quality. Ashworth also provocatively sketches what he sees as the next major challenge to postsecondary education: a "postindustrial" threat to the quality of academic research. Ashworth's sober reflections are likely to provoke controversy. He makes, for example, a broad-based attack upon nontraditional and external programs, which have too often been uncritically promoted. But his well-articulated theses demand careful, even agonizing, consideration by all who care about American higher education and who, like Ashworth, believe our colleges and universities hold the key to resolving the complex and dangerous issues confronting society.

One of the chief problems of the American environmental movement is the definition of philosophy--the exploration, examination, and elucidation of ideas--of the many different causes that have been combined in it. In this book Joseph Petulla sorts out the various issues and concepts of environmentalism by tracing their inspiration and values from the three traditions of environmental thought--the biocentric, the ecologic, and the economic. He examines the movement's historical roots, assumptions, goals, values, politics, struggles, successes, limitations, trends, and, finally, the priorities it has brought to the national consciousness. This disentangling, clarifying process involves political implications and judgments about the recent directions of the environmental movement. Absolutist assumptions and methodologies often lead environmentalists and their opponents into conflict, yet even conflict groups must live with each other in the natural world, and that natural world must be understood by reason. This book attempts to establish wider ethical understanding and a political basis for support of environmentalism by promoting rational discussion about increasingly important subjects.

The Mexican Revolution produced some romantic and heroic figures. In Mexico at the time, however, one man loomed large as the embodiment of revolutionary goals and the one leader able to take the country from strife into peace. That man was Alvaro Obregón. Less well-known to North Americans than his contemporaries and sometime allies Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, Obregón eventually formed the first stable government of post-revolutionary Mexico. Stories of his daring and near-invincibility abounded as he led revolutionary forces against the usurper Huerta, then against the "bandit" elements within the Revolution itself. Throughout the period of fighting, however, Obregón was shrewdly building coalitions of support and espousing concrete programs that would allow him to institutionalize power when the fighting ended. This political and social study of Obregón's rise to power, based on extensive archival research and interviews with revolutionary participants, provides an important perspective not only on the Revolution itself but also on its consolidation in the hands of an extraordinary leader. Students of Mexican history will find the book indispensable; others will find it a fascinating story of a man, a people, and how they lay the bases of peace in the midst of war.