Download or read book Comanche Midnight written by Stephen Harrigan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing timeless essays that capture vanished worlds and elusive perceptions, Stephen Harrigan is emerging as a national voice with an ever-expanding circle of enthusiastic readers. For those who have already experienced the pleasures of his writing—and especially for those who haven't—Comanche Midnight collects fifteen pieces that originally appeared in the pages of Texas Monthly, Travel Holiday, and Audubon magazines. The worlds Harrigan describes in these essays may be vanishing, but his writing invests them with an enduring reality. He ranges over topics from the past glories and modern-day travails of America's most legendary Indian tribe to the poisoning of Austin's beloved Treaty Oak, from the return-to-the-past realism of the movie set of Lonesome Dove to the intimate, off-season languor of Monte Carlo. If the personal essay can be described as journalism about that which is timeless, then Stephen Harrigan is a reporter of people, events, and places that will be as newsworthy years from now as they are today. Read Comanche Midnight and see if you don't agree.
Download or read book Cinematic Comanches written by Dustin Tahmahkera and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries Comanches have captivated imaginations. Yet their story in popular accounts abruptly stops with the so-called fall of the Comanche empire in 1875, when Quanah Parker led Comanches onto the reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. In Cinematic Comanches, the first tribal-specific history of Comanches in film and media, Parker descendant Dustin Tahmahkera examines how Comanches represent themselves and are represented by others in recent media. Telling a story of Comanche family and extended kin and their relations to film, Tahmahkera reframes a distorted and defeated history of Comanches into a vibrant story of cinematic traditions, agency, and cultural continuity. Co-starring a long list of Comanche actors, filmmakers, consultants, critics, and subjects, Cinematic Comanches moves through the politics of tribal representation and history to highlight the production of Comanchería cinema. From early silent films and 1950s Westerns to Disney’s The Lone Ranger and the story of how Comanches captured its controversial Comanche lead Johnny Depp, Tahmahkera argues that Comanche nationhood can be strengthened through cinema. Tahmahkera’s extensive research includes interviews with elder LaDonna Harris, who adopted Depp during filming in one of the most contested films in recent Indigenous cinematic history. In the fragmented popular narrative of the rise and fall of Comanches, Cinematic Comanches calls for considering mediated contributions to the cultural resurgence of Comanches today.
Download or read book The Eye of the Mammoth written by Stephen Harrigan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In four decades of writing for magazines ranging from Texas Monthly to the Atlantic, American History, and Travel Holiday, Stephen Harrigan has established himself as one of America’s most thoughtful writers. In this career-spanning anthology, which gathers together essays from two previous books—A Natural State and Comanche Midnight—as well as previously uncollected work, readers finally have a comprehensive collection of Harrigan’s best nonfiction. History—natural history, human history, and personal history—and place are the cornerstones of The Eye of the Mammoth. But the specific history or place varies considerably from essay to essay. Harrigan’s career has taken him from the Alaska Highway to the Chihuahuan Desert, from the casinos of Monaco to his ancestors’ village in the Czech Republic. Texas is the subject of a number of essays, and a force in shaping others, as in “The Anger of Achilles,” in which a nineteenth-century painting moves the author despite his possessing a “Texan’s suspicion of serious culture.” Harrigan’s deceptively straightforward voice, however, belies an intense curiosity about things that, by his own admission, may be “unknowable.” Certainly, we are limited in what we can know about the inner life of George Washington, the last days of Davy Crockett, or the motives of a caged tiger, but Harrigan’s gift—a gift that has also made him an award-winning novelist—is to bring readers closer to such things, to make them less remote, just as a cave painting in the title essay eerily transmits the living stare of a long-extinct mammoth.
Download or read book Comanche Sundown written by Jan Reid and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-06 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comanche Sundown is the story of the great war chief Quanah Parker, a freed slave and cowboy named Bose Ikard, and the women they love. In 1869 Quanah and Bose do their best to kill each other in a brutal fight on horseback in West Texas. But over several years, through the flash and chaos of war and killing they discover that they are friends, not enemies. They change from violent unformed youths into men of courage and decency. The son of the ferocious warrior Nocona and the tragic captive Texan Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah suffers the wound of being slurred and rejected by many Comanches as someone of impure blood and certain bad luck. When told he cannot marry his youthful love Weckeah, he rides off and joins another band of his people in the canyonlands and plains of the Texas Panhandle. Later, when Quanah has just emerged as a war chief in a daring rout of army cavalry, in defiance of elders and tradition he elopes with Weckeah and leads a following of the wildest Comanche bunch of all. The enslaved son of a white physician, Bose is freed by the Civil War and rides on trail drives of longhorns into New Mexico Territory that are led by the pioneering Charles Goodnight. Bose winds up captured, utilized, and eventually valued by Quanah and his people. That period in young Bose’s life brings him into intoxicating friendship with Quanah’s other wife, To-ha-yea, a Mescalero Apache and born heart-breaker. Comanche Sundown lays out a sprawling and plausible recast of Southwestern history that brings Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid, Bat Masterson, Colonel Ranald “Bad Hand” Mackenzie, and General William T. Sherman into one fray. In the tradition of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Jan Reid’s novel offers a rich blend of historical detail, exquisite eye for the terrain and the animals, and insight into the culture, customs, poetry, and dignity of Native Americans caught up in a desperate fight to survive.
Download or read book Remember Ben Clayton written by Stephen Harrigan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best American Historical Fiction Francis "Gil" Gilheaney is a sculptor of boundless ambition, but bad fortune and pride have driven him and his long-suffering daughter Maureen into artistic exile in Texas just after World War I. When an aging rancher commissions Gil to create a memorial statue of his son who was killed in action, Gil believes it will be his greatest achievement. But as work proceeds on the statue, Gil and Maureen come to realize that their new client is a far more complicated man than they ever expected, and that he is guarding a secret that haunts his relationship with his son even in death.
Download or read book The Gates of the Alamo written by Stephen Harrigan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestselling novel, modern historical classic, and winner of the TCU Texas Book Award, The Spur Award and the Wrangler Award for Outstanding Western Novel It’s 1836, and the Mexican province of Texas is in revolt. As General Santa Anna’s forces move closer to the small fort that will soon be legend, three people’s fates will become intrinsically tied to the coming battle: Edmund McGowan, a proud and gifted naturalist; the widowed innkeeper Mary Mott; and her sixteen-year-old son, Terrell, whose first shattering experience with love has led him into the line of fire. Filled with dramatic scenes, and abounding in fictional and historical personalities—among them James Bowie, David Crockett, William Travis, and Stephen Austin—The Gates of the Alamo is a faithful and compelling look at a riveting chapter in American history.
Download or read book The Woods Stretched for Miles written by John Lane and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathers essays about the southern landscape and nature by eighteen writers with ties to the region
Download or read book A Friend of Mr Lincoln written by Stephen Harrigan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is Illinois in the 1830s, and Abraham Lincoln is an ambitious—if charmingly awkward—young circuit lawyer and state legislator. Among his friends and political colleagues are Joshua Speed, William Herndon, Stephen Douglas, and many others who have come to the exploding frontier town of Springfield to find their futures. One of these men is poet Cage Weatherby. Cage both admires and clashes with Lincoln, questioning his cautious stance on slavery. But he stays by Lincoln's side, even as Lincoln slips back and forth between high spirits and soul-hollowing sadness and depression, and even as he recovers from a disastrous courtship to marry the beautiful, capricious, politically savvy Mary Todd. Mary will bring stability to Lincoln's life, but she will also trigger a conflict that sends the two men on very different paths into the future.
Download or read book The American Heritage Science Dictionary written by American Heritage Dictionary and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005 with total page 1054 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Big Wonderful Thing written by Stephen Harrigan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 944 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Leopard Is Loose written by Stephen Harrigan and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fragile, 1952 postwar tranquility of a young boy’s world explodes one summer day when a leopard escapes from the Oklahoma City zoo, throwing all the local residents into dangerous excitement, in this evocative story of a child’s confrontation with his deepest fears For Grady McClarty, an ever-watchful but bewildered five-year-old boy, World War II is only a troubling, ungraspable event that occurred before he was born. But he feels its effects all around him. He and his older brother Danny are fatherless, and their mother, Bethie, is still grieving for her fighter-pilot husband. Most of all, Grady senses it in his two uncles: young combat veterans determined to step into a fatherhood role for their nephews, even as they struggle with the psychological scars they carry from the war. When news breaks that a leopard has escaped from the Oklahoma City Zoo, the playthings and imagined fears of Grady’s childhood begin to give way to real-world terrors, most imminently the dangerous jungle cat itself. The Leopard Is Loose is a stunning encapsulation of America in the 1950s, and a moving portrait of a boy’s struggle to find his place in the world.
Download or read book Great Texas Birds written by John P. O'Neill and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents color reproductions of forty-eight Texas birds selected as the personal favorites of illustrator John O'Neill and editor Suzanne Winckler, each accompanied by a personal, scientific, or literary observation by a well-known Texas birder or nature writer.
Download or read book Conversations with Texas Writers written by Ramona Cearley and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2005-03-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of interviews with writers from the state of Texas, including poets, novelists, essayists, playwrights, and journalists, and provides insight into how Texas has shaped their writing, and contains excerpts from each authors work, as well as photographs, brief biographies, and bibliographies.
Download or read book The Comanche Empire written by Pekka Hamalainen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of the rise and decline of the vast and imposing Native American empire. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches’ remarkable impact on the trajectory of history. 2009 Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History “Cutting-edge revisionist western history…. Immensely informative, particularly about activities in the eighteenth century.”—Larry McMurtry, The New York Review of Books “Exhilarating…a pleasure to read…. It is a nuanced account of the complex social, cultural, and biological interactions that the acquisition of the horse unleashed in North America, and a brilliant analysis of a Comanche social formation that dominated the Southern Plains.”—Richard White, author of The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815
Download or read book Quanah Parker Comanche Chief written by William T. Hagan and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1995-09-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quanah Parker is a figure of almost mythical proportions on the Southern Plains. The son of Cynthia Parker, a white captive whose subsequent return to white society and early death had become a Texas frontier legend, Quanah rose from able warrior to tribal leader on the Comanche reservation. Other books about Quanah Parker have been incomplete, are outdated, or are lacking in scholarly analysis. William T. Hagan, the author of United States-Comanche Relations, knows Comanche history. This new biography, written in a crisp and readable style, is a well-balanced portrait of Quanah Parker, the chief, and Quanah, the man torn between two worlds. Between 1875 and his death in 1911, Quanah strove to cope with the changes confronting tribal members. Dealing with local Indian agents and with presidents and other high officials in Washington, he faced the classic dilemma of a leader caught between the dictates of an occupying power and the wrenching physical and spiritual needs of his people. Quanah was never one to decline the perquisites of leadership. Texas cattlemen who used his influence to gain access to reservation grass for their herds rewarded him liberally. They financed some of his many trips to Washington and helped him build a home that remains to this day a tourist attraction. Such was his fame that Teddy Roosevelt invited him to take part in his inaugural parade and subsequently intervened personally to help him and the Comanches as their reservation dissolved. Maintaining a remarkable blend of progressive and traditional beliefs, Quanah epitomized the Indian caught in the middle. Valued by almost all Indian agents with whom he dealt, he nevertheless practiced polygamy and the peyote religion - both contrary to government policy. Other Indians functioned as middlemen, but through his force and intelligence, and his romantic origins, Quanah Parker achieved unparalleled success and enduring renown. -- Publisher description
Download or read book City Wilds written by Terrell Dixon and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The assumptions we make about nature writing too often lead us to see it only as a literature about wilderness or rural areas. This anthology broadens our awareness of American nature writing by featuring the flora, fauna, geology, and climate that enrich and shape urban life. Set in neither pristine nor exotic environs, these stories and essays take us to rivers, parks, vacant lots, lakes, gardens, and zoos as they convey nature's rich disregard of city limits signs. With writings by women and men from cities in all regions of the country and from different ethnic traditions, the anthology reflects the geographic differences and multicultural makeup of our cities. Works by well-known and emerging contemporary writers are included as well as pieces from important twentieth-century urban nature writers. Since more than 80 percent of Americans now live in urban areas, we need to enlarge our environmental concerns to encompass urban nature. By focusing on urban nature writing, the selections in City Wilds can help develop a more inclusive environmental consciousness, one that includes both the nature we see on a day-to-day basis and how such nearby nature is viewed by writers from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Download or read book Water and Light written by Stephen Harrigan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1999-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the months the author spent diving on the coral reefs off Grand Turk Island in the Carribean.
