Texas Rangers, Ranchers, and Realtors
Texas Rangers, Ranchers, and Realtors

Author: Thomas O. McDonald

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2021-03-25

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 0806169737

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A native Georgian, James Hughes Callahan (1812–1856) migrated to Texas to serve in the Texas Revolution in exchange for land. In Seguin, Texas, where he settled, he met and married a divorcée, Sarah Medissa Day (1822–1856). The lives of these two Texas pioneers and their extended family would become so entwined in the events and experiences of the nascent nation and state that their story represents a social history of nineteenth-century Texas. From his arrival as a sergeant with the Georgia Battalion, through the ill-fated 1855 expedition that bears his name, to his shooting death in a feud with a neighbor, Callahan was a soldier, a Texas Ranger, a rancher, and a land developer, at every turn making his mark on the evolving Guadalupe River Basin. Separately, Sarah’s family’s journey reflected the experience of many immigrants to Texas after its war of independence. Thomas O. McDonald traces the pair’s respective paths to their meeting, then follows as, together, they contend with conflict, troublesome social mores, the emergence of new industries, and the taming of the land, along the way helping to shape the Texas culture we know today. With a sharp eye for character and detail, and with a wealth of material at his command, author Thomas O. McDonald tells a story as crackling with life as it is steeped in scholarly research. In these pages the lives of the Callahan and Day families become a canvas on which the history of Texas—from revolution, frontier defense, and Indian wars to Anglo settlement and emerging legal and social systems—dramatically, inexorably unfolds.

Tracking the Texas Ranger Historians
Tracking the Texas Ranger Historians

Author: Bruce A. Glasrud

Publisher: University of North Texas Press

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 1574419390

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The first systematic inquiry into the Texas Rangers did not begin until 1935 with Walter Prescott Webb’s publication The Texas Rangers. Since then numerous works have appeared on the Rangers, but no volume has been published before that covers the various historians of the Rangers and their approaches to the topic. Editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss Jr. gather essays that profile individual historians of the Texas Rangers, explore themes and issues in Ranger history, and comprise archival research, biographies, and autobiographies. Several approaches in Texas historiography have influenced the writings on the Texas Rangers and serve to organize the chapters in the volume. Traditionalists (Chuck Parsons, Stephen L. Moore, and Bob Alexander) stress the revered happenings in the nineteenth century that brought about the Lone Star state and its empire-building Ranger force. To these historical writers the Texas Rangers were part of a golden age. Revisionists (Robert M. Utley, Louis R. Sadler, and Charles H. Harris) pull back from this adulation, emphasize the importance of overlooked ethnic and racial groups, and point out misbehavior on the part of Rangers. They also want to separate fact from fiction. Some Ranger historians (Frederick Wilkins and Mike Cox) straddle both traditional and revisionist approaches in their works. The final group, Cultural Constructionalists (Gary Clayton Anderson, Américo Paredes, and Monica Muñoz Martinez), continue the work of Revisionists and focus on an interconnected past that includes theoretical approaches and the study of memory and regional identities. Several themes emerge throughout the book. One is how the Rangers changed from unorganized mounted militia, dragoons in the modern sense, to organized cavalry forces with six-shooter firepower who served as a military arm of the state and nation. A second is how the dichotomous views of the Rangers—as either patriot warriors or bloody avengers—left their imprint on Anglo and Hispanic society. This divergent examination especially derived from incidents in the US-Mexican War, the period from 1910 to 1920, and the lower Rio Grande valley in the 1960s. And yet another theme is how the Rangers first resisted and fought against, yet ultimately absorbed, all creeds and colors into their ranks over two hundred years as they evolved into police officers: Anglo, Black, Hispanic, Indian, and women Rangers.

Wicked San Antonio
Wicked San Antonio

Author: Mike Cox

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2022-09-19

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1439675945

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Delve into San Antonio's wicked past, from the lawless lore of the Spanish settlement through the criminal misdeeds of the modern metropolis. Residents of the Alamo City tolerated scores of cockfighting pits, gambling joints, opium dens, around-the-clock saloons and other places of ill-repute. Some disturbers of San Antonio's peace, like Judge Roy Bean, left town to achieve greater notoriety elsewhere. Others, like the thief who stole the McFarlin diamond, seemed to vanish into thin air. But all of them left a page-turning story behind. Mike Cox catalogues San Antonio's most infamous incidents and miscreants.

Unsettled Land
Unsettled Land

Author: Sam W. Haynes

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1541645405

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A bold new history of the origins and aftermath of the Texas Revolution, revealing how Indians, Mexicans, and Americans battled for survival in one of the continent’s most diverse regions The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land, historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—white Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over twenty-five years. After the battle of San Jacinto, racial lines snapped taut as a new nation, the Lone Star republic, sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved. This is a revelatory and essential new narrative of a major turning point in the history of North America.

Flying to Victory
Flying to Victory

Author: Mike Bechthold

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2017-04-06

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 0806157852

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Canadian-born flying ace Raymond Collishaw (1893–1976) served in Britain’s air forces for twenty-eight years. As a pilot in World War I he was credited with sixty-one confirmed kills on the Western Front. When World War II began in 1939, Air Commodore Collishaw commanded a Royal Air Force group in Egypt. It was in Egypt and Libya in 1940–41, during the Britain’s Western Desert campaign, that he demonstrated the tenets of an effective air-ground cooperation system. Flying to Victory examines Raymond Collishaw’s contribution to the British system of tactical air support—a pattern of operations that eventually became standard in the Allied air forces and proved to be a key factor in the Allied victory. The British Army and Royal Air Force entered the war with conflicting views on the issue of air support that hindered the success of early operations. It was only after the chastening failure of Operation Battleaxe in June 1941, fought according to army doctrine, that Winston Churchill shifted strategy on the direction of future air campaigns—ultimately endorsing the RAF's view of mission and target selection. This view adopted principles of air-ground cooperation that Collishaw had demonstrated in combat. Author Mike Bechthold traces the emergence of this strategy in the RAF air campaign in Operation Compass, the first British offensive in the Western Desert, in which Air Commodore Collishaw’s small force overwhelmed its Italian counterpart and disrupted enemy logistics. Flying to Victory details the experiences that prepared Collishaw so well for this campaign and that taught him much about the application of air power, especially how to work effectively with the army and Royal Navy. As Bechthold shows, these lessons learned altered the Allied approach to tactical air support and, ultimately, changed the course of the Second World War.

Historic Beaumont
Historic Beaumont

Author: Ellen Walker Rienstra

Publisher: HPN Books

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1893619281

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An illustrated history of Beaumont, Texas, paired with histories of the local companies.