With the Wests of Texas, noted author Bruce M. Shackelford tells the story of the West family of Lavaca County, forgotten Texas legends. Originally from Tennessee, Washington and Mary West moved to Lavaca County, Texas, in the early 1850s. There they raised three sons who were destined to leave an indelible mark on the Texas cattle industry. At the end of the Civil War, George, the eldest, made his first trail drives as so many Texans did. But unlike many who made the trip, George saw the venture as the business of moving cattle to market and became a professional drover. As his brothers Sol and Ike came of age, George brought them into his already growing business of trailing cattle herds north. The brothers became some of the most important drovers in cattle business, standing out during the era of the great trail drives. In their lifetimes their accomplishments were legendary, but today they have been largely forgotten. Their history and achievements are examined in this beautiful volume illustrated with photographs and personal effects from the family.
THE TEXAS ALMANAC 2016–2017 includes these new feature articles: • A history of Texas’ various food regions—from Tex-Mex to barbecue—written by Dotty Griffith, longtime food writer for The Dallas Morning News and author of The Texas Holiday Cookbook, Celebrating Barbecue, and Wild About Chili. • A look at the big business of Texas wine, including a history of grape growing and winemaking, written by Melinda Esco, author of Texas Wineries. • The story of Assault, the feisty chestnut colt from King Ranch who injured his right forefoot as a foal but loved to run and went on to win the 1946 Triple Crown. This article spotlights the 70th anniversary of Assault’s historic feat, which earned him the nickname “The Club-Footed Comet.” • A overview of professional and college sports in Texas written by Norm Hitzges, a popular sports-talk radio host in the DFW area for 40 years; the author of several sports books, including Greatest Team Ever: The Dallas Cowboys Dynasty of The 1990s; and the television play-by-play voice for the Dallas Sidekicks. MAJOR SECTIONS UPDATED FOR EACH EDITION An illustrated History of The Lone Star State. The Environment, including geology, plant life, wildlife, rivers, lakes. Weather highlights of the previous two years, plus a list of destructive weather dating from 1766. Agriculture, including data on production of crops, fruits, vegetables, livestock, and dairy. A Pronunciation Guide to Texas town and county names. Business and Transportation, with an expanded section on Oil and Gas. A two-year Astronomical Calendar, including moon phases, sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, eclipses, and meteor showers. Recreation, with details on state and national parks, landmarks, and wildlife refuges. Sports, including lists of high school and college sports champions, the records of professional sports teams, as well as lists of Texas Olympians and Texas Sports Hall of Fame inductees. Counties, a large section featuring detailed county maps and profiles for Texas’ 254 counties. Population figures, including the latest estimates from the State Data Center. A comprehensive list of Texas cities and towns. Politics, Elections, and information on Federal, State, and Local governments. Culture and the Arts, including a list of civic and religious holidays. Health and Science, with charts of vital statistics. Education, including a complete list of colleges and universities, and University Interscholastic League results. Obituaries of notable Texans.
What does it mean to live in the West today? Do people tend to identify with states, with regions, or with the larger West? This book examines the development of regional identity in the American West, demonstrating that it is a regionally diverse entity made up of many different wests--Great Plains, Southwest, Rocky Mountains, and more--in which American regionalism finds its fullest expression. These fourteen original essays tell how a sense of place emerged among residents of various regions and how a sense of those places was developed by people outside of them. Wrobel and Steiner first offer a compelling overview of the West's regional nature; then thirteen other rising or renowned scholars-from history, American Studies, geography, and literature-tell how regional consciousness formed among inhabitants of particular regions. All of the essays address the larger issue of the centrality of place in determining social and cultural forms and individual and collective identities. Some focus on race and culture as the primary influences on regional consciousness while others emphasize environmental and economic factors or the influence of literature. Some even examine western regionalism in areas that lie beyond the West as it has traditionally been conceived. Each of the contributors believes that where a people live helps determine what they are, and they write not only about the many wests within the larger West, but also about the constant state of flux in which regionalism exists. Many books speak of the West as a place, but few others deal with the West's different places. Many Wests presents a vision of the West that reflects both the common heritage and unique character of each major subregion, building on the revisionist impulse of the last decade to help redirect New Western History toward an appreciation of regional diversity and integrate scholarship in the regional subfields. It is a book for everyone who lives in, studies, or loves the West, for it confirms that it is home to very different peoples, economies, histories-and regions.
Winner, 2021 National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Western Heritage Award, Art/Photography Book (The Wrangler) Sometime in 1947, a letter arrived in the mailbox of Harold Dow Bugbee, already a well-known and highly sought illustrator for western pulp magazines and other publications. “Sir,” it began, “I have seen several of your pictures in the Cattleman. Sure like them and I am writing you to ask if you have all of your pictures in a book—if you do—we want to buy one.” “After seventy years of waiting,” writes Michael R. Grauer in this colorful survey of Bugbee’s life and career, “here is such a book.” Bugbee and his family arrived in Clarendon, Texas, in 1914, from Massachusetts. He helped his father with the 1,000-acre family ranch and eventually attended the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, where he studied architectural drawing. Subsequently, he enrolled at the Cumming School of Art in Des Moines, Iowa, but left after two years when the founder of the school told the young Texan that he had learned all the school had to offer. Bugbee avidly absorbed cowboy scenes and the lifestyle that birthed them. He filled canvases with colorful, authentic images that capture the spirit of the American West of the early to mid-1900s, especially in and near his beloved Texas Panhandle. By the 1930s, Bugbee was providing pen-and-ink sketches for magazines such as Ranch Romances, Western Stories, Country Gentleman, and Field and Stream. This richly illustrated overview of the man and his art provides a valuable and entertaining resource for collectors and students of western and Texas art.
This anthology examines Love's Labours Lost from a variety of perspectives and through a wide range of materials. Selections discuss the play in terms of historical context, dating, and sources; character analysis; comic elements and verbal conceits; evidence of authorship; performance analysis; and feminist interpretations. Alongside theater reviews, production photographs, and critical commentary, the volume also includes essays written by practicing theater artists who have worked on the play. An index by name, literary work, and concept rounds out this valuable resource.
The TSHA is pleased to announce the return of a classic in this second edition of Watt Matthews of Lambshead by renowned photographer Laura Wilson. In this new edition, Wilson adds an afterword to her original award-winning photographic essay, published in 1989 when Watt Matthews was ninety years old and the vital force behind a vast West Texas ranch. Watt was the ninth and last child of pioneering parents who had established the ranch on the banks of the Clear Fork of the Brazos in 1858, and, in the words of historian David McCullough, "created a family kingdom so large and still so true to its traditional way of life that visitors sometimes have to remind themselves that it is all real." Except for four years at Princeton, Watt spent his entire life on the ranch, which had remained its own separate world into the late twentieth century. Those days are beautifully chronicled in Wilson's photographs and, in this new edition, she brings the story of Lambshead Ranch up to the present by writing of Watt's funeral and what has happened to the ranch since Watt's death in 1997.
"This volume unifies the concerns of Civil War and western history, revealing how Confederate secession created new and shifting borderlands. In the West, both Civil War battlefields and Civil War politics engaged a wider range of ethnic and racial distinctions, raising questions that would arise only later in places farther east. Likewise, the histories of occupation, reincorporation, and expanded citizenship during Reconstruction in the South have ignored the connections to previous as well as subsequent efforts in the West. The stories contained in this volume complicate our understanding of the paths from slavery to freedom for white as well as non-white Americans. By placing the histories of the American West and the Civil War and Reconstruction into one sustained conversation, this volume expands the limits of both by emphasizing how struggles over land, labor, sovereignty, and citizenship shaped the U.S. nation-state in this tumultuous era. This volume highlights significant moments and common concerns of this continuous conflict, as it stretched across the continent and throughout the nineteenth century"--Provided by publisher.
The writers of these chapters are often working with changing assumptions about literary and media interpretations of an American West. Here we see critical approaches to a West that never was, a West of myth so enduring that the myth dominates nearly all artistic representation about this place that never was. In this collection, we see critical approaches to a New West, a West that is a state of mind, not a geographical place but a mythic space with no boundaries and no political inevitabilities. These New Western studies accept the idea of a West that includes Canada, Mexico, Alaska, and, in the case of the US, every geographic and historical point west of the historic founding settlements. The West we study today is a post-West, an idea of the West past the traditional views of an old West dominated by white US nationalism and gendered as uncompromisingly masculine. The idea itself of a single West no longer holds validity. We now understand that all renderings of the West are renderings of multiple Wests; Wests constructed by American nationalists, Wests constructed by EuroAmerican writers and filmmakers, Wests constructed by native peoples, or Wests constructed outside the geographical boundaries of the US. This collection presents an eclectic array of new scholarship ranging freely over the New Wests and Post Wests, dealing with issues such as the literature of a 1950s California West; eco-crime genre fiction; the West of Edward Dorn and the Beat Movement; images of prostitution in California Gold Rush literature; European perspectives on film representations of the first peoples; the six shooter and the American West; German Westerns and Italian Westerns; The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, by Charles Neider; and films such as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Into the Wild, There Will Be Blood, and The Last Picture Show. A unique aspect of this collection is the range of writers interpreting the American West in film and literature; besides those writing from within the United States, five of the writers provide international perspectives from the United Kingdom, and the Universities of Tunis, Vienna, and Rome. Each chapter includes a review of scholarship on its subject and an extended bibliography for further research.
This new historical overview tells the dramatic story of the American West from its prehistory to the present. A narrative history, it covers the region from the North Dakota-to-Texas states to the Pacific Coast and includes experiences and contributions of American Indians, Hispanics, and African Americans.
