Download or read book On the Edge of a Dream A South Texas Story written by Mary Mijares and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2005-04-29 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: font face="Verdana"font size="2" On the Edge of a Dream is a story about my grandparents’ journey by train from Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo Leon Mexico, to Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas Mexico, Laredo, Texas, and on to South Texas to claim a home in America. They courageously faced the unknown seeking to make a better life for their families here in the United States believing they had greater opportunities to realize their dreams. Dad was seven years old at that time. As he grew older, he faced greater challenges in achieving these opportunities. It was my dad’s dream of writing a book about his family’s struggles to make their American dream a reality that inspired me to write this book. After arriving in South Texas, my grandparents first had to find work in order to make a living for their families. They weren’t afraid of work. They were unskilled workers, so they found work in farms or ranches working with cattle, horses, or plowing in the fields. When cotton-harvesting season came, they weren’t afraid of picking cotton though it was hard, backbreaking work, to say nothing of carrying large cotton sacks on their shoulders. My paternal grandfather died on January 1, 1921, when my dad, the oldest child, was almost thirteen-years-old, leaving Grandma a widow with five children. Grandma faced this challenge by working as a housekeeper for the farm owners. Dad found what hard work was at the early age of thirteen years. When he was not working in the fields in the hot and humid Texas climate, he worked in the dairy farms. When I was two years old, my maternal grandparents returned to Mexico when they found that Mexico had land grants for those wishing to return home. Quite possibly they decided they wanted to own their piece of land to farm it in order to make more money. My mom’s two oldest brothers stayed in America and raised their families in South Texas. Hard work was not the only thing my parents faced. They also had to learn a new language if they wanted to understand their employers. Learning the English language was hard. Surrounded by Spanish speaking family member, it was easier to speak Spanish to them instead of speaking English. Eventually, Dad learned enough English to make himself understood. Another challenge my grandparents faced was a lack of education which would have made life easier and maybe more profitable. They only had the minimal education they could get in Mexico, but they taught their children to read and write in Spanish. Though my parents were very young when they journeyed to America, they lived in farms far from schools. Since they had no transportation to get to school, they could not attend even if they wanted to do so. They saw the importance of an education early in their lives because they were unable to get that education themselves. In 1930, my parents met and married. Two years later, I was born in Gregory, Texas, while my brother was born two years after me, and my younger sister seven years after my brother. My parents never lost sight of what an education could do. By the time we were old enough to begin school, they did everything possible to get us there. Also by then, transportation was available. Busses took us to and from school. Mom and Dad made sure we had what we needed to be successful students. Getting our college degrees after we graduated was an almost impossible dream. Dad did not make much, so when I graduated, I could only afford to go to business school. It was much later when I earned my Bachelor of Arts and Master’s of Arts degrees. My younger sister and my brother both received Bachelor of Science degrees. My dad’s dream of writing to tell of his family’s journey to America inspired me to write this book. It took boldness to travel to a new country, strength to make a living by performing backbreaking work, and perseverance from us, his chil
Download or read book The Harness Maker s Dream written by Nick Kotz and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-25 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both historical study and ancestral narrative, The Harness Maker’s Dream follows the story of Ukrainian immigrant Nathan Kallison’s journey to the United States in search of a brighter future. At the turn of the twentieth century, over two million Jews emigrated from Czarist Russia and Eastern Europe to escape anti-Semitic law. Seventeen-year-old Kallison and his brothers were among those brave enough to escape persecution and pursue a life of freedom by leaving their homeland in 1890. Faced with the challenges of learning English and earning wages as a harness maker, Kallison struggles to adapt to his new environment. Kallison moves to San Antonio, Texas, where he finds success by founding one of the largest farm and ranch supply businesses in south Texas and eventually running one of the region’s most innovative ranches. Despite enormous changes in environment and lifestyle, Nathan Kallison and his beloved wife Anna manage to maintain their cultural heritage by raising their children in the Jewish faith, teaching them that family values and a strong sense of character are more important than any worldly achievement. The son of Nathan Kallison's daughter Tibe, author Nick Kotz provides a moving account of his ancestors’ search for the American dream. Kotz’s work has received recognition by the Texas Jewish Historical Society for eloquently depicting the reality of life for Jewish immigrants in Texas during this time and delineating their significant contributions to society. Kotz’s insight into the life of this inspiring individual will prompt readers to consider their own connections to America’s immigrant past and recognize the beauty of our nation’s diverse history.
Download or read book Tales Told at Midnight Along the Rio Grande written by Valley Byliners and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2006-12 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tales Told at Midnight Along the Rio Grande: A great river with two names forms the southern boundary of Texas. Here, two cultures clash and old world ghosts collide with new. Two peoples create their myths and legends, each with their own heroes and villains, lovers and friends, natural and supernatural. Collected and created by the Valley Byliners are 34 such tales suitable for those darkest hours. The members of the Valley Byliners, whose history as an organization stretches back to the 1940s, have come together to produce a fourth book. The writers sincerely hope you'll be amazed and thrilled. Perhaps you'll feel the chill of something other-worldly at your back as you read their latest offering.
Download or read book Boating written by and published by . This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Steal written by Rachel Shteir and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of shoplifting, revealing the roots of our modern dilemma. Rachel Shteir's The Steal is the first serious study of shoplifting, tracking the fascinating history of this ancient crime. Dismissed by academia and the mainstream media and largely misunderstood, shoplifting has become the territory of moralists, mischievous teenagers, tabloid television, and self-help gurus. But shoplifting incurs remarkable real-life costs for retailers and consumers. The "crime tax"-the amount every American family loses to shoplifting-related price inflation-is more than $400 a year. Shoplifting cost American retailers $11.7 billion in 2009. The theft of one $5.00 item from Whole Foods can require sales of hundreds of dollars to break even. The Steal begins when shoplifting entered the modern record as urbanization and consumerism made London into Europe's busiest mercantile capital. Crossing the channel to nineteenth-century Paris, Shteir tracks the rise of the department store and the pathologizing of shoplifting as kleptomania. In 1960s America, shoplifting becomes a symbol of resistance when the publication of Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book popularizes shoplifting as an antiestablishment act. Some contemporary analysts see our current epidemic as a response to a culture of hyper-consumerism; others question whether its upticks can be tied to economic downturns at all. Few provide convincing theories about why it goes up or down. Just as experts can't agree on why people shoplift, they can't agree on how to stop it. Shoplifting has been punished by death, discouraged by shame tactics, and protected against by high-tech surveillance. Shoplifters have been treated by psychoanalysis, medicated with pharmaceuticals, and enforced by law to attend rehabilitation groups. While a few individuals have abandoned their sticky-fingered habits, shoplifting shows no signs of slowing. In The Steal, Shteir guides us through a remarkable tour of all things shoplifting-we visit the Woodbury Commons Outlet Mall, where boosters run rampant, watch the surveillance footage from Winona Ryder's famed shopping trip, and learn the history of antitheft technology. A groundbreaking study, The Steal shows us that shoplifting in its many guises-crime, disease, protest-is best understood as a reflection of our society, ourselves.
Download or read book The Wind Doesn t Need a Passport written by Tyche Hendricks and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning journalist Tyche Hendricks has explored the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by car and by foot, on horseback, and in the back of a pickup truck. She has shared meals with border residents, listened to their stories, and visited their homes, churches, hospitals, farms, and jails. In this dazzling portrait of one of the least understood and most debated regions in the country, Hendricks introduces us to the ordinary Americans and Mexicans who live there—cowboys and Indians, factory workers and physicians, naturalists and nuns. A new picture of the borderlands emerges, and we find that this region is not the dividing line so often imagined by Americans, but is a common ground alive with the energy of cultural exchange and international commerce, burdened with too-rapid growth and binational conflict, and underlain with a deep sense of history.
Download or read book At Freedom s Edge written by William Cohen and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cohen presents a thorough treatment of the efforts of the freedmen's Bureau to restructure the southern labor system, showing how heavily this organization was influenced by questions involving black mobility.
Download or read book Healing the Fisher King written by G. Scott Sparrow and published by We Publish Books. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful true story of one man's spiritual and emotional healing on the home waters of his childhood. Lured by the dream of catching a great fish in the middle years of his life, the author is drawn into an initiation in which he must decide to live fully or to die.
Download or read book 23 Roads to Mythville written by Douglas McDaniel and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2005 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The combined three books of The Mythville Trilogy in the one book, an apocalyptic journey across America and meditation on the imposition of order in space, both cyber and dirt real. By experiential author Douglas McDaniel, who explores the mysteries of American networked life.
Download or read book Surveying Borders Boundaries and Contested Spaces in Curriculum and Pedagogy written by Cole Reilly and published by IAP. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Curriculum and Pedagogy book series is an enactment of the mission and values espoused by the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group, an international educational organization serving those who share a common faith in democracy and a commitment to public moral leadership in schools and society. Accordingly, the mission of this series is to advance scholarship that engages critical dispositions towards curriculum and instruction, educational empowerment, individual and collectivized agency, and social justice. The purpose of the series is to create and nurture democratic spaces in education, an aspect of educational thought that is frequently lacking in the extant literature, often jettisoned via efforts to de-politicize the study of education. Rather than ignore these conversations, this series offers the capacity for educational renewal and social change through scholarly research, arts-based projects, social action, academic enrichment, and community engagement. Authors will evidence their commitment to the principles of democracy, transparency, agency, multicultural inclusion, ethnic diversity, gender and sexuality equity, economic justice, and international cooperation. Furthermore, these authors will contribute to the development of deeper critical insights into the historical, political, aesthetic, cultural, and institutional subtexts and contexts of curriculum that impact educational practices. Believing that curriculum studies and the ethical conduct that is congruent with such studies must become part of the fabric of public life and classroom practices, this book series brings together prose, poetry, and visual artistry from teachers, professors, graduate students, early childhood leaders, school administrators, curriculum workers and planners, museum and agency directors, curators, artists, and various under-represented groups in projects that interrogate curriculum and pedagogical theories.
Download or read book America History and Life written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Article abstracts and citations of reviews and dissertations covering the United States and Canada.
Download or read book Peckinpah written by Paul Seydor and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book that re-established Peckinpah's reputation--now thoroughly revised and updated! When critics hailed the 1995 re-release of Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, it was a recognition of Paul Seydor's earlier claim that this was a milestone in American film, perhaps the most important since Citizen Kane. Peckinpah: The Western Films first appeared in 1980, when the director's reputation was at low ebb. The book helped lead a generation of readers and filmgoers to a full and enduring appreciation of Peckinpah's landmark films, locating his work in the central tradition of American art that goes all the way back to Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. In addition to a new section on the personal significance of The Wild Bunch to Peckinpah, Seydor has added to this expanded, revised edition a complete account of the successful, but troubled, efforts to get a fully authorized director's cut released. He describes how an initial NC-17 rating of the film by the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board nearly aborted the entire project. He also adds a great wealth of newly discovered biographical detail that has surfaced since the director's death and includes a new chapter on Noon Wine, credited with bringing Peckinpah's television work to a fitting resolution and preparing his way for The Wild Bunch. This edition stands alone in offering full treatment of all versions of Peckinpah's Westerns. It also includes discussion of all fourteen episodes of Peckinpah's television series, The Westerner, and a full description of the versions of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid now (or formerly) in circulation, including an argument that the label "director's cut" on the version in release by Turner is misleading. Additionally, the book's final chapter has been substantially rewritten and now includes new information about Peckinpah's background and sources.
Download or read book Drive Thru Dreams written by Adam Chandler and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is a book to savor, especially if you’re a fast-food fan.”—Bookpage "This fun, argumentative, and frequently surprising pop history of American fast food will thrill and educate food lovers of all speeds." —Publishers Weekly Most any honest person can own up to harboring at least one fast-food guilty pleasure. In Drive-Thru Dreams, Adam Chandler explores the inseparable link between fast food and American life for the past century. The dark underbelly of the industry’s largest players has long been scrutinized and gutted, characterized as impersonal, greedy, corporate, and worse. But, in unexpected ways, fast food is also deeply personal and emblematic of a larger than life image of America. With wit and nuance, Chandler reveals the complexities of this industry through heartfelt anecdotes and fascinating trivia as well as interviews with fans, executives, and workers. He traces the industry from its roots in Wichita, where White Castle became the first fast food chain in 1921 and successfully branded the hamburger as the official all-American meal, to a teenager's 2017 plea for a year’s supply of Wendy’s chicken nuggets, which united the internet to generate the most viral tweet of all time. Drive-Thru Dreams by Adam Chandler tells an intimate and contemporary story of America—its humble beginning, its innovations and failures, its international charisma, and its regional identities—through its beloved roadside fare.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture written by Robert Gregg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a meeting point for world cultures, the USA is characterized by its breadth and diversity. Acknowledging that diversity is the fundamental feature of American culture, this volume is organized around a keen awareness of race, gender, class and space and with over 1,200 alphabetically-arranged entries - spanning 'the American century' from the end of World War II to the present day - the Encyclopedia provides a one-stop source for insightful and stimulating coverage of all aspects of that culture. Entries range from short definitions to longer overview essays and with full cross-referencing, extensive indexing, and a thematic contents list, this volume provides an essential cultural context for both teachers and students of American studies, as well as providing fascinating insights into American culture for the general reader. The suggestions for further reading, which follows most entries, are also invaluable guides to more specialized sources.
Download or read book New Stories from the South written by Shannon Ravenel and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-time editor of Best American Short Stories has selected 15 short stories from and about the American South of today.
Download or read book The Canyon s Edge written by Dusti Bowling and published by Youth Large Print. This book was released on 2023-12-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hatchet meets Long Way Down in this heartfelt and gripping novel in verse about a young girl's struggle for survival after a climbing trip with her father goes terribly wrong. One year after a random shooting changed their family forever, Nora and her father are exploring a slot canyon deep in the Arizona desert, hoping it will help them find peace. Nora longs for things to go back to normal, like they were when her mother was still alive, while her father keeps them isolated in fear of other people. But when they reach the bottom of the canyon, the unthinkable happens: A flash flood rips across their path, sweeping away Nora's father and all of their supplies. Suddenly, Nora finds herself lost and alone in the desert, facing dehydration, venomous scorpions, deadly snakes, and, worst of all, the Beast who has terrorized her dreams for the past year. If Nora is going to save herself and her father, she must conquer her fears, defeat the Beast, and find the courage to live her new life. Don't miss Dusti Bowling's new novel, Dust, available for preorder now.
Download or read book Terraform written by Brian Merchant and published by MCD x FSG Originals. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of near future science fiction from VICE’s acclaimed, innovative digital speculative story destination, Terraform—in print for the first time. Terraform hones the predictive capacity of science fiction and seeks new, vivid, and visceral ways to depict the future we’re hurtling toward, translating the decay and anxiety that surround us into something else, something unexpected, something that burns like a beacon and upends the conventional ideas of where we’ll end up next. Section by section—Watch/Worlds/Burn—the book takes on surveillance, artificial intelligence, and climate collapse. With a potent roster of established names and rising talents—from Bruce Sterling, Ellen Ullman, Cory Doctorow, Jeff VanderMeer, and Omar El Akkad, to E. Lily Yu, Elvia Wilk, Fernando Flores, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Gus Moreno—it confronts the issues that orbit our everyday existence, and takes them to unsettling dimensions.
