Download or read book Reflections on the Neches written by Geraldine Ellis Watson and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Having been a plant ecologist and park ranger for the US National Park Service, Watson has now returned to her native east Texas and settled in her private nature preserve. She documents a voyage (accompanied by her old blind dog) down the river Neches River, called Snow River by natives. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Download or read book Gus Wortham written by Fran Dressman and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gus S. Wortham was a good businessman. Among other enterprises, he started a highly successful insurance company, American General, and helped to shape the economic institutions of Houston. Gus Wortham was a civic leader, who worked actively in the Chamber of Commerce to influence the city's economic climate and who left the city a legacy of cultural institutions, including the Wortham Theater Center. Gus Wortham was a rancher and land developer. Land: "They aren't making any more if it", he liked to say. So he bought it, developed it, and built a business with it. In short, he became one of the most influential men in the history of Houston. This is the story of his life, his business, his city. Company records and interviews with Wortham's surviving friends and associates combine to make it a thorough account. "Mr. Wortham had an interesting philosophy about several matters in life", writes his longtime friend and business partner Sterling C. Evans in the Foreword. "One was on dollars. With the business dollar, it was immoral not to make money and one had to make sure to receive full value. With the pleasure dollar, if one could afford it, enjoy it and never look back". This old-school Southwestern gentleman lived a life worthy of a movie, and his company, American General, has shaped a city worthy of a television series of its own. Urban and business historians alike will find this book a fascinating study, and those who know, or want to know, Houston will find it an enlightening chronicle.

Download or read book Saving the Big Thicket written by James Cozine and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Big Thicket of East Texas, which at one time covered over two million acres, served as a barrier to civilizations throughout most of historic times. This text is a classic account of the region's history and a play-by-play narrative of the prolonged fight for the Big Thicket Preserve.

Download or read book Always for the Underdog written by Keagan LeJeune and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from newspapers, court records, and a decade of interviews and observation, LeJeune offers a penetrating examination of the interplay between legend and place, exploring Smith's own life, this unique historical moment, and the place's mysterious landscape. The book also considers how contemporary festivals and other forms of cultural heritage employ the legend as a cultural recourse. To stay vibrant and meaningful, culture constantly re-makes itself; here, the outlaw occupies a vital role in the re-creation. --Book Jacket.

Download or read book Big Thicket People written by Larry Jene Fisher and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living off the land—hunting, fishing, and farming, along with a range of specialized crafts that provided barter or cash income—was a way of life that persisted well into the twentieth century in the Big Thicket of southeast Texas. Before this way of life ended with World War II, professional photographer Larry Jene Fisher spent a decade between the 1930s and 1940s photographing Big Thicket people living and working in the old ways. His photographs, the only known collection on this subject, constitute an irreplaceable record of lifeways that first took root in the southeastern woodlands of the colonial United States and eventually spread all across the Southern frontier. Big Thicket People presents Fisher's photographs in suites that document a wide slice of Big Thicket life-people, dogs, camps, deer hunts, farming, syrup mills, rooter hogs and stock raising, railroad tie making, barrel stave making, chimney building, peckerwood sawmills, logging, turpentining, town life, church services and picnics, funerals and golden weddings, and dances and other amusements. Accompanying each suite of images is a cultural essay by Thad Sitton, who also introduces the book with a historical overview of life in the Big Thicket. C. E. Hunt provides an informative biography of Larry Jene Fisher.

Download or read book Nameless Towns written by Thad Sitton and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive history of the sawmill towns of East Texas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sawmill communities were once the thriving centers of East Texas life. Many sprang up almost overnight in a pine forest clearing, and many disappeared just as quickly after the company “cut out” its last trees. But during their heyday, these company towns made Texas the nation’s third-largest lumber producer and created a colorful way of life that lingers in the memories of the remaining former residents and their children and grandchildren. Drawing on oral history, company records, and other archival sources, Sitton and Conrad recreate the lifeways of the sawmill communities. They describe the companies that ran the mills and the different kinds of jobs involved in logging and milling. They depict the usually rough-hewn towns, with their central mill, unpainted houses, company store, and schools, churches, and community centers. And they characterize the lives of the people, from the hard, awesomely dangerous mill work to the dances, picnics, and other recreations that offered welcome diversions. Winner, T. H. Fehrenbach Award, Texas Historical Commission “After completing the book, I truly understood life in the sawmill communities, intellectually and emotionally. It was very satisfying. Conrad and Sitton write in such a manner to make one feel the hard life, smell the sawdust, and share the danger of the mills. The book is compelling and stimulating.” —Robert L. Schaadt, Director-Archivist, Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center

Download or read book Edison to Enron written by Robert L. Bradley, Jr. and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The oil industry in the United States has been the subject of innumerable histories. But books on the development of the natural gas industry and the electricity industry in the U.S. are scarce. Edison to Enron is a readable flowing history of two of America's largest and most colorful industries. It begins with the story of Samuel Insull, a poor boy from England, who started his career as Thomas Edison's right-hand man, then went on his own and became one of America's top industrialists. But when Insull's General Electric's energy empire collapsed during the Great Depression, the hitherto Great Man was denounced and prosecuted and died a pauper. Against that backdrop, the book introduces Ken Lay, a poor boy from Missouri who began his career as an aide to the head of Humble oil, now part of Exxon Mobil. Lay went on to become a Washington bureaucrat and energy regulator and then became the wunderkind of the natural gas industry in the 1980s with Enron. To connect the lives of these two energy giants, Edison to Enron takes the reader through the flamboyant history of the American energy industry, from Texas wildcatters to the great pipeline builders to the Washington wheeler-dealers. From the Reviews... "This scholarly work fills in much missing history about two of America's most important industries, electricity and natural gas." —Joseph A. Pratt, NEH-Cullen Professor of History and Business, University of Houston "... a remarkable book on the political inner workings of the U.S. energy industry." —Robert Peltier, PE, Editor-in-Chief, POWER Magazine "This is a powerful story, brilliantly told." —Forrest McDonald, Historian

Download or read book Americans and Their Forests written by Michael Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-06-26 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr Williams begins by exploring the role of the forest in American culture: the symbols, themes, and concepts - for example, pioneer woodsman, lumberjack, wilderness - generated by contact with the vast land of trees. He considers the Indian use of the forest, describing the ways in which native tribes altered it, primarily through fire, to promote a subsistence economy.

Download or read book The Hogg Family and Houston written by Kate Sayen Kirkland and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Progressive former governor James Stephen Hogg moved his business headquarters to Houston in 1905. For seven decades, his children Will, Ima, and Mike Hogg used their political ties, social position, and family fortune to improve the lives of fellow Houstonians. As civic activists, they espoused contested causes like city planning and mental health care. As volunteers, they inspired others to support social service, educational, and cultural programs. As philanthropic entrepreneurs, they built institutions that have long outlived them: the Houston Symphony, the Museum of Fine Arts, Memorial Park, and the Hogg Foundation. The Hoggs had a vision of Houston as a great city--a place that supports access to parklands, music, and art; nurtures knowledge of the "American heritage which unites us"; and provides social service and mental health care assistance. This vision links them to generations of American idealists who advanced a moral response to change. Based on extensive archival sources, The Hogg Family and Houston explains the impact of Hogg family philanthropy for the first time. This study explores how individual ideals and actions influence community development and nurture humanitarian values. It examines how philanthropists and volunteers mold Houston's traditions and mobilize allies to meet civic goals. It argues that Houston's generous citizens have long believed that innovative cultural achievement must balance aggressive economic expansion.

Download or read book Black Unionism in the Industrial South written by Ernest Obadele-Starks and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Obadele-Starks eloquently captures these workers' fight and discusses the implications of their struggle on the industrial society of the Upper Texas Gulf Coast today. Students and scholars of American labor history, race relations, and Texas history will find Black Unionism in the Industrial South a valuable scholarly work."--Jacket.

Download or read book Roosevelt Sweeps Nation written by David Pietrusza and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 693 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal for US History From the acclaimed author of 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents and 1960: LJB vs JFK vs Nixon—The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies comes a dazzling panorama of presidential and political personalities, ambitions, plots, and counterplots; racism, anti-Semitism, anti-socialism, and anti-communism, and the landslide referendum on FDR’s New Deal policies in the 1936 presidential election. Award-winning historian David Pietrusza boldly steers clear of the pat narrative regarding Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented 1936 re-election landslide, weaving an enormously more intricate, ever more surprising tale of a polarized nation; of America’s most complex, calculating, and politically successful president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the very top of his Machiavellian game; and the unlocking of the puzzle of how our society, our politics, and our parties fitfully reinvented themselves. With in-depth examinations of rabble-rousing Democratic US Senator Huey Long and his assassination before he was able to challenge FDR in ’36; powerful, but widely hated, newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, who blasted FDR’s “Raw Deal”; wildly popular, radical radio commentator Father Coughlin; the steamrolled passage of Social Security and backlash against it; the era’s racism and anti-Semitism; American Socialism and Communism; and a Supreme Court seemingly bent on dismantling the New Deal altogether, Roosevelt Sweeps Nation is a vivid portrait of a dynamic Depression-Era America. Crafting his account from an impressive and unprecedented collection of primary and secondary sources, Pietrusza has produced an engrossing, original, and authoritative account of an election, a president, and a nation at the crossroads. The nation’s stakes were high . . . and the parallels hauntingly akin to today’s dangerously strife-ridden political and culture wars.

Download or read book Manufacturers Record written by and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book American Book Publishing Record Cumulative 1950 1977 Title index written by R.R. Bowker Company. Department of Bibliography and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 2258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lone Star Tarnished written by Cal Jillson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-09 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texas pride, like everything else in the state, is larger than life. So, too, perhaps, are the state’s challenges. Lone Star Tarnished approaches public policy in the nation’s most populous "red state" from historical, comparative, and critical perspectives. The historical perspective provides the scope for asking how various policy domains have developed in Texas history. In each chapter, Cal Jillson compares Texas public policy choices and results with those of other states and the United States in general. Finally, the critical perspective allows readers to question the balance of benefits and costs attendant to what is often referred to as "the Texas way" or "the Texas model" and to assess the many claims of Texas’s exceptionalism. Through Jillson’s lively and lucid prose, students are well equipped to analyse how Texas has done and is doing compared to selected states and the national average over time and today. This text is aimed at students and professors of Texas politics who want to stress history, political culture, and public policy. New to the Fourth Edition Fully updated to include the most recent Texas elections and political events Covers the 2019 legislative session Highlights new population data, with projections forward to 2050, recently released by the U.S. Census and the Texas State Data Center. Explores the dramatic increases in Texas oil and gas production and their impact on global and U.S. prices and on the profitability and the viability of many Texas producers in light of the recent plunge in prices. All figures and tables include the most recent data available.

Download or read book The Texas Right written by David O'Donald Cullen and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-22 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Texas Right: The Radical Roots of Lone Star Conservatism, some of our most accomplished and readable historians push the origins of present-day Texas conservatism back to the decade preceding the twentieth century. They illuminate the initial factors that began moving Texas to the far right, even before the arrival of the New Deal. By demonstrating that Texas politics foreshadowed the partisan realignment of the erstwhile Solid South, the studies in this book challenge the traditional narrative that emphasizes the right-wing critique of modern America voiced by, among others, radical conservatives of the state’s Democratic Party, beginning in the 1930s. As the contributors show, it is impossible to understand the Jeffersonian Democrats of 1936, the Texas Regular movement of 1944, the Dixiecrat Party of 1948, the Shivercrats of the 1950s, state members of the John Birch Society, Texas members of Young Americans for Freedom, Reagan Democrats, and most recently, even, the Tea Party movement without first understanding the underlying impulses that produced their formation.

Download or read book The Big Rich written by Bryan Burrough and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-03-30 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Full of schadenfreude and speculation—and solid, timely history too.” —Kirkus Reviews “This is a portrait of capitalism as white-knuckle risk taking, yielding fruitful discoveries for the fathers, but only sterile speculation for the sons—a story that resonates with today's economic upheaval.” —Publishers Weekly “What's not to enjoy about a book full of monstrous egos, unimaginable sums of money, and the punishment of greed and shortsightedness?” —The Economist Phenomenal reviews and sales greeted the hardcover publication of The Big Rich, New York Times bestselling author Bryan Burrough's spellbinding chronicle of Texas oil. Weaving together the multigenerational sagas of the industry's four wealthiest families, Burrough brings to life the men known in their day as the Big Four: Roy Cullen, H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Sid Richardson, all swaggering Texas oil tycoons who owned sprawling ranches and mingled with presidents and Hollywood stars. Seamlessly charting their collective rise and fall, The Big Rich is a hugely entertaining account that only a writer with Burrough's abilities-and Texas upbringing-could have written.

Download or read book Kenneth and John B Rayner and the Limits of Southern Dissent written by Gregg Cantrell and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating story of two nineteenth-century southern political mavericks, Gregg Cantrell details their fate as dissenters, telling a human story at once heroic and shameful, hopeful and tragic. The two mavericks were the slaveholding congressman and planter Kenneth Rayner of North Carolina and his illegitimate mulatto son, John B. Rayner of Texas. Born in 1808, Kenneth served in the North Carolina legislature for twenty years and in Congress for six as a Whig. In 1854 he became a major leader of the American (Know-Nothing) party. His staunch Unionism and a willingness to cooperate with Republicans incurred the wrath of his fellow southerners. After supporting secession, working for a peace settlement during the war, writing a biography of Andrew Johnson, and going broke in a grandiose cotton-planting venture, he joined the Republican parry and held federal offices in the Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur administrations. Kenneth Rayner's son, John, was born in 1850. His mother was a slave. The elder Rayner acknowledged his paternity and provided a college education. John held local offices in North Carolina during Reconstruction, then led a migration of black farmworkers to Texas in 1880. There he preached, taught school, and took part in his adopted state's prohibition battles. A master orator, he joined the Populist party in 1892 and soon became its preeminent black leader. After the turn of the century blacks were disfranchised and Rayner, like his father before him, found his political career in ruins. He spent the rest of his days working for black education and trying to preserve some voice for blacks in southern politics. Both men were out of step with the rapidlychanging politics of their time. Each eventually compromised his principles and personal dignity in futile efforts to salvage a way of life that earlier actions had jeopardized. Both were devoted to traditional republican principles, which estranged them from the South's major political parties. In the end, however, their political careers - Kenneth's in North Carolina and John's in Texas - were destroyed by their adherence to unacceptably liberal positions on the issue of race, a topic that indeed constituted the limit of southern dissent.