" ... provides updated county and town listings within the same overall state-by-state organization ... information on records and holdings for every county in the United States, as well as excellent maps from renowned mapmaker William Dollarhide ... The availability of census records such as federal, state, and territorial census reports is covered in detail ... Vital records are also discussed, including when and where they were kept and how"--Publisher decription.
Arranged alphabetically, this work lists the names and counties of residence of approximately 18,000 Texas taxpayers. (A "poll" tax of one dollar was levied on every white male resident over the age of twenty-one and on women who were heads of household.) By 1846, when Texas became the thirty-sixth state in the Union, there were sixty-seven county governments already organized as functioning units of the state, yet no authorized census of the state was undertaken until 1850. This 1846 poll list, compiled from the original tax rolls housed in the Texas State Archives, is actually the nearest thing we have to a complete census of the period.
Richard Coke played one of the most crucial roles in Texas history. His leadership of his beloved Texas still resonates today – 150 years after he became governor. Richard Coke: Texan weaves a rich mosaic of real people and events that immerses the reader in the life and times of Richard Coke. Richard Coke brought Texas out of Reconstruction following the Civil War and is often credited for restoring democracy to the state after this perilous time. Richard Coke: Texan is his story – one in which a young Virginia lawyer emigrates to a Texas frontier village and changes history. It follows Coke as he starts a new life in Waco, Texas, serves in the Civil War, endures the hardships of Reconstruction, and is called into service as governor to rebuild the state and return rights to local government and the people of Texas. The story of Coke and his legislature taking office is one of the more spectacular in Texas history, with Coke’s predecessor, Edmund Davis, engaging armed forces to occupy the Capitol to remain in office. But the true story is the leadership shown by Coke as a committed citizen, an honored soldier, a dedicated governor, then as a respected senator—the results of which still impact the government of Texas today. Before the advent of digital technology, much of the record of this time was inaccessible to researchers. Authored by Rosser Coke Newton, Sr., an indirect descendant of the governor, the book is enriched by first-person accounts, Coke family records, Richard Coke’s direct correspondence, as well as actual events documented by journals and debates from constitutional conventions, the Secession Convention, and legislative sessions. These are supplemented by newspaper articles, census records, city directories, and a myriad of other sources of information compiled at the time. These sources have been combined into Richard Coke: Texan which not only delivers a rich history of the era, but a personal look at one of Texas’ greatest leaders.
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.
Arkansas's Old State House, arguably the most famous building in the state, was conceived during the territorial period and has served through statehood. A History of Arkansas's Old State House traces the history of the architecture and purposes of the remarkable building. The history begins with Gov. John Pope's ideas for a symbolic state house for Arkansas and continues through the construction years and an expansion in 1885. After years of deterioration, the building was abandoned by the state government, and the Old State House then became a medical school and office building. Kwas traces the subsequent fight for the building's preservation on to its use today as a popular museum of Arkansas history and culture. Brief biographies of secretaries of state, preservationists, caretakers, and others are included, and the book is generously illustrated with early and seldom-seen photographs, drawings, and memorabilia.
The Conquest of Labor offers the first biography of Daniel Pratt (1799-1873), a New Hampshire native who became one of the South's most important industrialists. After moving to Alabama in 1833, Pratt started a cotton gin factory near Montgomery that by the eve of the Civil War had become the largest in the world. Pratt became a household name in cotton-growing states, and Prattville-the site of his operations-one of the antebellum South's most celebrated manufacturing towns. Based on a rich cache of personal and business records, Curtis J. Evans's study of Daniel Pratt and his "Yankee" town in the heart of the Deep South challenges the conventional portrayal of the South as a premodern region hostile to industrialization and shows that, contrary to current popular thought, the South was not so markedly different from the North.
