This book is considered to be the starting place for anyone having family history ties to New Mexico, and for those interested in the history of New Mexico. Well before Jamestown and the Pilgrims, New Mexico was settled continuously beginning in 1598 by Spaniards whose descendants still make up a major portion of the population of New Mexico.
Conquistador General Don Diego de Vargas led hundreds of Spanish pioneers in New Mexico after the 1680 Indian Revolt. This book charts military conflicts with Native Americans that ultimately brought peace and prosperity, and names early settlers and families. Two land grants were awarded to the author's ancestor by the Spanish crown.
In this engaging book, Eric Van Young traces the political, economic, and social development of Mexico through the crucial one hundred years of its remarkable transition from a relatively prosperous Spanish colony to a violently unstable republic marked by economic stagnation, political confrontation, and burgeoning efforts at modernization. Featuring primary sources from figures of the period, Van Young discusses the political instability of the period—internal warfare, military uprisings, intermittent dictatorships, sharp conflicts among political groupings—and attributes them to a belief by political actors in the fundamental lack of legitimacy in central government institutions after the sweeping away of the Bourbon imperial structure and its replacement first with a very short-lived Mexican empire followed by a series of increasingly authoritarian aspirational republican constitutions.
Tres Ritos was first settled by the Jornada Mogollon in AD 900, and these ancient farmers left their presence in the form of more than twenty-one thousand petroglyphs along a mile-long ridge. The valley was visited by Spanish explorers in the 1600s and became the homeland of the Mescalero Apaches about that same time. Patrick Coghlan, the "Cattle King of Tularosa," built a major ranch here with his cattle being rustled and sold to him by none other than Billy the Kid. Susan McSween Barber, the widow of Alexander McSween of Lincoln County War fame, prospered here as the "Cattle Queen of New Mexico." Albert Fall, infamous for his participation in the Teapot Dome Scandal, owned Coghlan's ranch and much more. Join local historian Gary Cozzens as he tells the story of Tres Ritos--a small but intriguing place in New Mexico history.
A lively, engaging ethnography that demonstrates how a volatile politics of race, class, and nation animates the infamously violent struggles over forests in the U.S. Southwest.
From the bestselling author of The Devil in the White City, here is the true story of the deadliest hurricane in history. National Bestseller September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in American history--and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating personal tragedy. Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Riveting, powerful, and unbearably suspenseful, Isaac's Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the great uncontrollable force of nature.