Beaumont was born when the thickly wooded banks of the Neches River were settled in the 1820s. Businessmen and adventurers stayed in the area once they saw the advantages of the river and the region's abundance of timber and other agricultural resources. By 1880, Beaumont was a lumber, ranching, farming, and shipping center. The railroad spurred population growth from 2,500 to 5,000, then Providence intervened: the Lucas Gusher at Spindletop blew in on January 10, 1901, and suddenly more oil than had ever been seen ushered in a new world. The Rockefeller Standard Oil monopoly may have ended in the courts, but Spindletop's oil dwarfed the known world supply, creating companies like Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil), Gulf, and Texaco. Beaumont continued to grow, and with a second boom in 1925, flowing oil brought more people and the building of a gracious city.
This is the story of a free black Creole family with beginnings in French Louisiana in 1740. It's a story of struggle and triumph with an indomitable cast of characters. The narrative traces the family's beginnings from the union between a litigious runaway slave of African descent and a conniving French settler who is an early colonizer in the Louisiana territory. The book is a tribute to the slave matriarch who managed to obtain and secure her own freedom and that of her four children who advanced quickly from being slaves to slave owners. Their children become members of a land owning elite black planter class which ultimately finds itself out of place in the slave holding Deep South with the dawn of the Civil War. The book explores the plight of generations of the family's fight to remain free and in the period immediately before and after the Civil War. Some become guerilla fighters and resist Confederate attempts to induct them into service. Others go in exile in Haiti to escape the vigilante movement in Louisiana. In the post-Reconstruction period and most of the twentieth century, the family is up against the Jim Crow laws and periods of pervasive violence against blacks. Discrimination is pervasive and the effect is harsh but the family does not give up. Land is preserved and with it independence. When the state fails to provide schools, the family put up its own schools. The fight for civil rights goes on. They march, they sit-in, they find a way to educate their children and protect them from the harshest effects of discrimination. The determination to remain free and the tradition of land ownership are the glue that holds the family together throughout the saga. The author follows leading characters that preserved these traditions over a period of more than 200 years and passed them on to her generation.
From its earliest days of human habitation, the Texas coast was home to seemingly endless clouds of ducks, geese, swans, and shorebirds. By the 1880s Texas huntsmen, or market hunters, as they came to be called, began providing meat and plumage for the restaurant tables and millinery salons of a rapidly growing nation. A network of suppliers, packers, distribution centers, and shipping hubs efficiently handled their immense harvest. At the peak of Texas market hunting in the late 1890s, Rockport merchants shipped an average of 600 ducks a day in a five-month shooting season, and in the last year of legal market hunting, an estimated 60,000 ducks and geese were shipped from Corpus Christi alone. Market men employed efficient methods to harvest nature’s bounty. They commonly hunted at night, often using bait to concentrate large numbers of waterfowl. The effectiveness of the hunt was improved when side-by-side double barrel shotguns and large-gauge swivel guns gave way to repeating firearms, with some capable of discharging as many as eleven shells in a single volley. Their methods were so efficient that, by the late 1800s, Texas sportsmen and others blamed the alarming decline of coastal waterfowl populations on the market hunter’s occupation. In 1903, after a long fight and many failures, the first migratory bird game law passed the Texas legislature. Though the fight would continue, it was the beginning of the end of the year-round slaughter. Most market hunters quit, and those who didn’t became outlaws. In this book, R. K. Sawyer chronicles the days of market hunting along the Texas coast and the showdown between the early game wardens and those who persisted in commercial waterfowl hunting. Containing an abundance of rare historical photographs and oral history, Texas Market Hunting: Stories of Waterfowl, Game Laws, and Outlaws provides a comprehensive and colorful account of this bygone period.
Respected museum professionals discuss contemporary issues and successful programs, and offer practical guidelines and information, up-to-date references, and lively illustrations in this wide-ranging volume. Interpreting Historic House Museums captures the big picture and important details. Its scope and accessbility will make it useful and relevant for both students and practicing professionals.
"With auction prices of Tiffany lamps soaring, collectors are turning to Tiffany's highly desirable art glass, or Favrile glass. These luminescent vessels seize--and continue to hold--the imagination. Author Paul Doros explores the full range of remarkably diverse and innovative styles and forms that Tiffany Studios produced. Former Curator of Glass at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Doros spent twenty-five years studying and researching the subject. His definitive account is accompanied by David Schlegel's masterly photography, which captures the exquisite delicacy of the "Flowerform" vases, the dramatically dripping golden flow of the "Lava" vases, the dazzling iridescence of the "Cypriote" vases, and much more. A must for all lovers of Tiffany, art glass, and the decorative arts"--
"In the pivotal decades around the turn of the century, American domestic life underwent dramatic alteration. From backstairs to front stairs, spaces and the activities within them were radically affected by shifts in the larger social and material environments. This volume, while taking account of architecture and decoration, moves us beyond the study of buildings to the study of behaviors, particularly the behaviors of those who peopled the middle-class, single-family, detached American home between 1880 and 1930." "The book's contributors study transformations in services (such as home utilities of power, heat, light, water, and waste removal) in servicing (for example, the impact of home appliances such as gas and electric ranges, washing machines, and refrigerators), and in serving (changes in domestic servants' duties, hours of work, racial and ethnic backgrounds)." "In blending intellectual and home history, these essays both examine and exemplify the perennial American enthusiasm for, as well as anxiety about, the meaning of modernity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Readers of Stanley Crawford's first book on farming, A Garlic Testament, can look forward to an update on his farming practices and reflections on the natural world in THE GARLIC PAPERS: A Small Garlic Farm in the Age of Global Vampires . In the fall of 2014, Crawford questioned the U.S. Department of Commerce's granting of an exemption of duties to the largest importer of Chinese garlic, setting off a massive legal battle in which his small farm has been pitted against the Chinese importer and its several international law firms. An account of this David and Goliath battle, now in its fifth year, makes up the core of the book, in which Crawford describes his personal and farming life under a cloud of lawsuits and administrative skirmishes. The unusual case was of sufficient interest that it became the subject of a Netflix documentary, Garlic Breath," in the six-part series, "Rotten," released in 2018."
"A blisteringly funny, wrenching account of wrestling way too close to—and later loose from—booze, sex and drugs and his adorable, infuriating mother. Bravo!" —Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of The Liars' Club "Whoever said you can't get sober for someone else never met my mother, Mama Jean. When I came to in a Manhattan emergency room after an overdose to the news that she was on her way from Texas, I panicked. She was the last person I wanted to see on that dark September morning, but the person I needed the most." So begins this astonishing memoir—by turns both darkly comic and deeply poignant—about this native Texan's long struggle with alcohol, his complicated relationship with Mama Jean, and his sexuality. From the age of five all Brickhouse wanted was to be at a party with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other and all Mama Jean wanted was to keep him at that age, her Jamie doll forever. A Texan Elizabeth Taylor with the split personality of Auntie Mame and Mama Rose, always camera-ready and flamboyantly outspoken, Mama Jean haunted him his whole life, no matter how far away he went or how deep in booze he swam. Brickhouse's journey takes him from Texas to a high-profile career in book publishing amid New York's glamorous drinking life to his near-fatal descent into alcoholism. After Mama Jean ushers him into rehab and he ultimately begins to dig out of the hole he'd found himself in, he almost misses his chance to prove that he loves her as much as she loves him. Bitingly funny, raw, and insightful, Dangerous When Wet is the unforgettable story of a unique relationship between a son and his mother.
