Download or read book Sheer Will written by David H. Falloure and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-04-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mud and surrounded by snakes and alligators, the city of Houston was born. The umbilical cord that would feed its economic prosperity for the future started along the swamps and would navigate a slow meandering river with an uncertain future. Sheer Will by definition not only describes the change in direction of ships, as ships did to open Texas to global trade. Sheer Will describes those that came before us to bring vision and clarity to an uncertain future. Through efforts of people like George Graham, Nicholas Clopper, Charles Morgan, Thomas Ball, Baldwin Rice, and Jesse Jones, the region and the state have become an irreplaceable economic engine for our nation as the energy capital of the world. David Falloure gives the reader a taste of our rich history of those leaders with clear vision and true grit for big ideas. Our history has been filled, and always will be filled, with the "big" challenges that need big ideas and bold leaders. Those that have preceded us have risen to the challenges that run the gamut from wars to storms with the never ending drone of naysayers, but our history is also filled with people of vision and determination to take on history-bending challenges that left us the busiest port in the United States and the economic legacy we enjoy today. Now as then, the challenges to commerce, create jobs and protect where we live have not changed from those that were faced over one hundred years ago. But Sheer Will provides a glimpse of the grit needed to repeat the success we enjoy today. --Leonard Waterworth. -- Back cover.

Download or read book Houston Ship Channel written by Promote Houston Ship Channel, 2014, Inc.. and published by . This book was released on 2014-08-14 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Houston Ship Channel 100 year history book celebrating its centennial in 2014. Containing photographs and historical narrative.

Download or read book The Port of Houston written by Marilyn Mcadams Sibley and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1968-01-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sam Houston's army reached Buffalo Bayou on April 18, 1836, and the ensuing Battle of San Jacinto called attention to the "meandering stream" as a link between the interior of sprawling Texas and the sea. Early in Texas history, the waterway that would one day be known as the Houston Ship Channel evoked dreams in the minds of the enterprising. How these dreams became realities that surpassed all expectation is the subject of Marilyn McAdams Sibley's The Port of Houston: A History. It is the story of the growth of an unlikely inland port situated at a "tent city" that many Texans thought would die young. It proves, as an early visitor to Houston noted, that future greatness depends not so much on location of port or town as on an enterprising population. Controversy between dreamers and promoters is a large part of the story. Was Houston or Harrisburg the head of navigation? Was the shallow stream valuable enough to the nation to warrant the costly deep-water dredging? Was Houston or Galveston to command the trade where land and water meet? As the issues were settled, Houston had spread out to overtake Harrisburg; deep water was achieved in 1914 and was celebrated by ceremonies in which the President of the United States played a part; and Galveston grew into a self-contained island metropolis while Houston became, in the words of Sibley, "the perennial boom town of twentieth-century Texas." As the Port of Houston continued to grow into a multi-billion-dollar institution serving and served by the cotton, wheat, oil, and space industries, its full economic impact on the city of Houston, the state, and the nation cannot be estimated in dollars and cents. But a glance at the trade statistics in the Appendix alone will give some idea of the world-wide value of this thriving port. The many interesting illustrations accompanying Mrs. Sibley's story show in graphic terms the growth of a small town on a stream "of a very inconvenient size;—not quite narrow enough to jump over, a little too deep to wade through without taking off your shoes" into an international complex through which almost $4 billion in cargo passed in its fiftieth-anniversary year.

Download or read book Energy Metropolis written by Martin V. Melosi and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2007-07-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Houston's meteoric rise from a bayou trading post to the world's leading oil supplier owes much to its geography, geology, and climate: the large natural port of Galveston Bay, the lush subtropical vegetation, the abundance of natural resources. But the attributes that have made it attractive for industry, energy, and urban development have also made it particularly susceptible to a variety of environmental problems. Energy Metropolis presents a comprehensive history of the development of Houston, examining the factors that have facilitated unprecedented growth-and the environmental cost of that development.The landmark Spindletop strike of 1901 made inexpensive high-grade Texas oil the fuel of choice for ships, industry, and the infant automobile industry. Literally overnight, oil wells sprang up around Houston. In 1914, the opening of the Houston Ship Channel connected the city to the Gulf of Mexico and international trade markets. Oil refineries sprouted up and down the channel, and the petroleum products industry exploded. By the 1920s, Houston also became a leading producer of natural gas, and the economic opportunities and ancillary industries created by the new energy trade led to a population boom. By the end of the twentieth century, Houston had become the fourth largest city in America.Houston's expansion came at a price, however. Air, water, and land pollution reached hazardous levels as legislators turned a blind eye. Frequent flooding of altered waterways, deforestation, hurricanes, the energy demands of an air-conditioned lifestyle, increased automobile traffic, exponential population growth, and an ever-expanding metropolitan area all escalated the need for massive infrastructure improvements. The experts in Energy Metropolis examine the steps Houston has taken to overcome laissez-faire politics, indiscriminate expansion, and infrastructural overload. What emerges is a profound analysis of the environmental consequences of large-scale energy production and unchecked growth.

Download or read book Houston Ship Channel and Buffalo Bayou Texas written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Rivers and Harbors and published by . This book was released on 1938 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Port of Houston written by Mark Lardas and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To reach the Port of Houston's Turning Basin, a ship must travel 50 miles along a narrow and twisting channel that passes through Galveston Bay, the San Jacinto River, and Buffalo Bayou. Despite this improbable location, Houston has the world's largest landlocked port. Measured by annual tonnage shipped, the Port of Houston is the second-largest port in the United States. Its docks, wharves, and facilities cover more than 25 miles. The port starts its second century as a seaport in 2014. Its transformation from a crowded river port into an industrial giant is fascinating. It is a tale of technology, geography, politics, hard work, and Texas brag--mixed with a little luck.

Download or read book Houston Ship Channel Texas Greens Bayou written by United States. Engineers Corps and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Houston Ship Channel Maintenance Dredging written by and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Houston Ship Channel and Buffalo Bayou Texas written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Rivers and Harbors and published by . This book was released on 1938 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Houston on the Move written by Steven R. Strom and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Houston completely transformed itself during the twentieth century, burgeoning from a regional hub into a world-class international powerhouse. This remarkable metamorphosis is captured in the Bob Bailey Studios Photographic Archive, an unparalleled visual record of Houston life from the 1930s to the early 1990s. Founded by the commercial photographer Bob Bailey in 1929, the Bailey Studios produced more than 500,000 photographs and fifty-two 16 mm films, making its archive the largest and most comprehensive collection of images ever taken in and around Houston. The Bob Bailey Studios Archive is now owned by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. Houston on the Move presents over two hundred of the Bailey archive’s most memorable and important photographs with extended captions that detail the photos’ subjects and the reasons for their significance. These images, most never before published, document everything from key events in Houston’s modern history—World War II; the Texas City Disaster; the building of the Astrodome; and the development of the Ship Channel, Medical Center, and Johnson Space Center—to nostalgic scenes of daily life. Bob Bailey’s expertly composed photographs reveal a great city in the making: a downtown striving to be the best, biggest, and tallest; birthday parties, snow days, celebrations, and rodeos; opulent department stores; Hollywood stars and political leaders; rapid industrial and commercial growth; and the inexorable march of the suburbs. An irresistible “remember that?” book for long-time Houstonians, Houston on the Move will also be an essential reference for historians, photographers, designers, and city planners.

Download or read book Houston Noir Akashic Noir written by Gwendolyn Zepeda and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brooklyn Noir came first in 2004, and now, 15 years later, Houston Noir--14 stories of intrigue, betrayal and death set from Tanglewood to Third Ward penned by current or former Houston authors--goes on sale." --Houston Chronicle "Akashic Books's long-running Noir Series tasks writers with imagining the dark sides of their communities, spinning gritty, shocking tales atop the local landscape. Recently the publisher tapped writer and former Houston poet laureate Gwendolyn Zepeda to serve as editor on a collection of stories about her native Bayou City. The end result is Houston Noir, out this month, whose 14 entries explore the murder, betrayal, and brujería lurking everywhere from River Oaks to the Ship Channel to a trailer park off FM 1960." --Houstonia Magazine "Houston is a city on the rise when it comes to crime fiction--something about all those lonely highways, gravity-defying overpasses, and drastic urban sprawl (and of course, the crime rate) make Houston a perfect setting for noir. This port city of close to five million residents is ready for a new reputation as a world capital of literature, and we're here to support Akashic's new collection of noir tales from Texas's most complex city." --CrimeReads, included in The Best New Crime Fiction of May 2019 "With sprawl and serial killers, Houston Noir packs a mean punch...Houston Noir is a welcome addition to the city's slowly filling bookcase." --Texas Observer "Editor Gwendolyn Zepeda has cannily divided the collection into four separate areas of the city, which only serves to multiply a reader's certainty: Like the sodden sheet covering a much-lacerated corpse, all of Houston is pretty much dripping with crime. Best to experience it, we suggest, only between the covers of this new paperback." --Austin Chronicle Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: Tom Abrahams, Robert Boswell, Sarah Cortez, Anton DiSclafani, Stephanie Jaye Evans, Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, Adrienne Perry, Pia Pico, Reyes Ramirez, Icess Fernandez Rojas, Sehba Sarwar, Leslie Contreras Schwartz, Larry Watts, and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. From the introduction by Gwendolyn Zepeda: In a 2004 essay, Hunter S. Thompson described Houston as a "cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West--which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch." For what it's worth, that quote is now posted on a banner somewhere downtown and regularly, gleefully repeated by our local feature writers. Houston is a port city on top of a swamp and, yes, it has no zoning laws. And that means it's culturally diverse, internally incongruous, and ever-changing. At any intersection here, I might look out my car window and see a horse idly munching St. Augustine grass. And, within spitting distance of that horse, I might see a "spa" that's an obvious brothel, a house turned drug den, or a swiftly rising bayou that might overtake a car if the rain doesn't let up...Overall, this collection represents the very worst our city has to offer, for residents and visitors alike. But it also presents some of our best voices, veteran and emerging, to any reader lucky enough to pick up this book.

Download or read book Ship of Ghosts written by James D. Hornfischer and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2009-03-25 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Son, we’re going to Hell." The navigator of the USS Houston confided these prophetic words to a young officer as he and his captain charted a course into U.S. naval legend. Renowned as FDR’s favorite warship, the cruiser USS Houston was a prize target trapped in the far Pacific after Pearl Harbor. Without hope of reinforcement, her crew faced a superior Japanese force ruthlessly committed to total conquest. It wasn’t a fair fight, but the men of the Houston would wage it to the death. Hornfischer brings to life the awesome terror of nighttime naval battles that turned decks into strobe-lit slaughterhouses, the deadly rain of fire from Japanese bombers, and the almost superhuman effort of the crew as they miraculously escaped disaster again and again–until their luck ran out during a daring action in Sunda Strait. There, hopelessly outnumbered, the Houston was finally sunk and its survivors taken prisoner. For more than three years their fate would be a mystery to families waiting at home. In the brutal privation of jungle POW camps dubiously immortalized in such films as The Bridge on the River Kwai, the war continued for the men of the Houston—a life-and-death struggle to survive forced labor, starvation, disease, and psychological torture. Here is the gritty, unvarnished story of the infamous Burma–Thailand Death Railway glamorized by Hollywood, but which in reality mercilessly reduced men to little more than animals, who fought back against their dehumanization with dignity, ingenuity, sabotage, will–power—and the undying faith that their country would prevail. Using journals and letters, rare historical documents, including testimony from postwar Japanese war crimes tribunals, and the eyewitness accounts of Houston’s survivors, James Hornfischer has crafted an account of human valor so riveting and awe-inspiring, it’s easy to forget that every single word is true. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from James D. Hornfischer's Neptune's Inferno.

Download or read book Houston Ship Channel 1998 written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Other Great Migration written by Bernadette Pruitt and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth century has seen two great waves of African American migration from rural areas into the city, changing not only the country’s demographics but also black culture. In her thorough study of migration to Houston, Bernadette Pruitt portrays the move from rural to urban homes in Jim Crow Houston as a form of black activism and resistance to racism. Between 1900 and 1950 nearly fifty thousand blacks left their rural communities and small towns in Texas and Louisiana for Houston. Jim Crow proscription, disfranchisement, acts of violence and brutality, and rural poverty pushed them from their homes; the lure of social advancement and prosperity based on urban-industrial development drew them. Houston’s close proximity to basic minerals, innovations in transportation, increased trade, augmented economic revenue, and industrial development prompted white families, commercial businesses, and industries near the Houston Ship Channel to recruit blacks and other immigrants to the city as domestic laborers and wage earners. Using census data, manuscript collections, government records, and oral history interviews, Pruitt details who the migrants were, why they embarked on their journeys to Houston, the migration networks on which they relied, the jobs they held, the neighborhoods into which they settled, the culture and institutions they transplanted into the city, and the communities and people they transformed in Houston.

Download or read book Houston Then and Now written by William Dylan Powell and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1836 revolutionaries routed the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto and the nearby town took the name of the battle’s victor, General Sam Houston. Since that time Houston has become America’s fourth largest city, and its magnificent cityscape of concrete, glass, and steel bears little resemblance to traditional Texas imagery. It’s easy to see why its residents, showing allegiance to their unique heritage, proudly refer to themselves as Houstonians rather than Texans.It was an entrepreneurial New York family who first promoted Houston’s lush landscape and vast potential in the Northeast and Europe, and the town expanded from a handful of tents into a place of over 10,000 residents by 1900. Oil was discovered nearby in 1901 and from then on Houston never looked back. Sites include: City Hall, Carnegie Library, Houston Courthouse, Merchants and Manufacturers Building, Allen’s Landing, Houston Chronicle, Main and Preston, Sam Houston Hotel, USS Texas, San Jacinto Monument, Congress Avenue, Houston Water Works, Hermann Building, Texas Capitol Building, Majestic Metro, Old Cotton Exchange, Gulf Building, Moorish Federal Building, Carter’s Folly, Kress Building, Union Station, Esperson Building, Antioch Church, Houston Light Guard Armory, Magnolia Brewery, Grand Central Station, Rice University, Museum of Fine Arts, Hermann Park, Miller Outdoor Theatre and Warwick Hotel.

Download or read book A Texan Plan for the Texas Coast written by James B. Blackburn and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this powerful call to action, conservationist and environmental lawyer Jim Blackburn offers an unconventional yet feasible plan to protect the Texas coast. The coast is in danger of being damaged beyond repair due to the gradual starvation of freshwater inflows to its bays, the fragmentation of large tracts of land, and general public neglect. Most importantly, it is threatened by our denial that the coast faces major threats and that its long-term health provides significant economic benefits. To save coastal resources, a successful plan needs to address the realities of our current world. The challenge is to sustain an economy that creates optimism and entrepreneurship while considering finite natural resources. In other words, a successful plan to save the Texas coast needs to be about making money. Whether visiting with farmers and ranchers or oil and chemical producers, Blackburn recognizes that when talking about the natural environment in monetary terms, people listen. Many of the services we get from the coast are beginning to be studied for their dollar values, a trend that might offer Texas farms and ranches the potential for cash flow, which may in turn alter conservation practices throughout Texas and the United States. Money alone cannot be the only motivation for caring about the Texas coast, though. Blackburn encourages Texans to get to know this landscape better. Beautifully illustrated and accessibly written, A Texan Plan for the Texas Coast weaves together a challenging but promising plan to protect the coast through economic motivation, thoughtful litigation, informed appreciation, and simple affection for the beauty and life found on the Texas coast.

Download or read book John Hill for the State of Texas written by John L. Hill and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Find out more about this title here: http: //johnhillfortexas.com/ During his distinguished career, John L. Hill Jr. served as secretary of state, attorney general, and chief justice of the state supreme court--the only person to hold all three state offices. Hill's office played a significant role in vastly expanding Texas consumer protections, waging war against wholesale rate increases by AT&T/Southwestern Bell; and resolving the disposition of Howard Hughes's fabled estate to bring tens of millions of dollars into Texas coffers. Before Hill's death in July 2007, Ernie Stromberger, journalist and Hill's longtime friend, worked with him to craft this first-person narrative.