Texas Loud, Proud, and Brash

Texas Loud, Proud, and Brash
Author: Rusty Williams
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2023-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1493064401

The history of New Texas, the Texas we know today—oil-rich, insufferably loud, and unbearably proud of itself—begins in the late 1920s, when a horned frog wakes from its thirty-one-year nap in a courthouse cornerstone and flabbergasts the nation. In slightly over two decades ten individuals—their words, actions, and accomplishments—come to define the New Texas of the twenty-first century. While the history of Old Texas rests on oft-told legends of Houston, Austin, Travis, Crockett, Rusk, Lamar, and Seguin, today’s New Texas—proud, loud, self-promotional, sports-crazy, and too rich for its own good—is the Texas that percolates throughout the nation’s popular culture. In Texas Loud, Proud, and Brash: How Ten Mavericks Created the Twentieth-Century Lone Star State, author Rusty Williams profiles ten largely unsung men and women responsible for the Texas you love, hate, and (secretly) envy today.

Tracking the Texas Ranger Historians

Tracking the Texas Ranger Historians
Author: Bruce A. Glasrud
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2024-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1574419390

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.

The Red River Bridge War

The Red River Bridge War
Author: Rusty Williams
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2016-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1623494052

Winner, 2017 Oklahoma Book Award, sponsored by the Oklahoma Center for the Book Winner, 2016 Outstanding Book on Oklahoma History, sponsored by the Oklahoma Historical Society At the beginning of America’s Great Depression, Texas and Oklahoma armed up and went to war over a 75-cent toll bridge that connected their states across the Red River. It was a two-week affair marked by the presence of National Guardsmen with field artillery, Texas Rangers with itchy trigger fingers, angry mobs, Model T blockade runners, and even a costumed Native American peace delegation. Traffic backed up for miles, cutting off travel between the states. This conflict entertained newspaper readers nationwide during the summer of 1931, but the Red River Bridge War was a deadly serious affair for many rural Americans at a time when free bridges and passable roads could mean the difference between survival and starvation. The confrontation had national consequences, too: it marked an end to public acceptance of the privately owned ferries, toll bridges, and turnpikes that threatened to strangle American transportation in the automobile age. The Red River Bridge War: A Texas-Oklahoma Border Battle documents the day-to-day skirmishes of this unlikely conflict between two sovereign states, each struggling to help citizens get goods to market at a time of reduced tax revenue and little federal assistance. It also serves as a cautionary tale, providing historical context to the current trend of re-privatizing our nation’s highway infrastructure.

Deadly Dallas

Deadly Dallas
Author: Rusty Williams
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2021-06-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1439672830

Spring of 1904. An inexperienced automobile driver jumps the curb and drives into the lobby of the St. George Hotel. The mayor orders a roundup of unlicensed dogs due to a citywide outbreak of rabies. An elevator crushes the head of a young man as he retrieves a half dollar he had dropped down the shaft. Embers from a wood-burning stove transform a sleeping house into a funeral pyre. A ten-year-old boy in City Park has a spike driven into his temple by a playmate with a fence picket. All this in just a few days. Rusty Williams catalogues the heartbreaking and bizarre forms in which death stalked Dallas at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Alcalde

The Alcalde
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2006-07
Genre:
ISBN:

As the magazine of the Texas Exes, The Alcalde has united alumni and friends of The University of Texas at Austin for nearly 100 years. The Alcalde serves as an intellectual crossroads where UT's luminaries - artists, engineers, executives, musicians, attorneys, journalists, lawmakers, and professors among them - meet bimonthly to exchange ideas. Its pages also offer a place for Texas Exes to swap stories and share memories of Austin and their alma mater. The magazine's unique name is Spanish for "mayor" or "chief magistrate"; the nickname of the governor who signed UT into existence was "The Old Alcalde."

White Fur

White Fur
Author: Jardine Libaire
Publisher: Hogarth
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2017-05-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0451497945

A stunning star-crossed love story set against the glitz and grit of 1980s New York City When Elise Perez meets Jamey Hyde on a desolate winter afternoon, fate implodes, and neither of their lives will ever be the same. Although they are next-door neighbors in New Haven, they come from different worlds. Elise grew up in a housing project without a father and didn’t graduate from high school; Jamey is a junior at Yale, heir to a private investment bank fortune and beholden to high family expectations. Nevertheless, the attraction is instant, and what starts out as sexual obsession turns into something greater, stranger, and impossible to ignore. The couple moves to Manhattan in search of a new life, and White Fur follows them as they wander through Newport mansions and East Village dives, WASP-establishment yacht clubs and the grimy streets below Canal Street, fighting the forces determined to keep them apart. White Fur combines the electricity of Less Than Zero with the timeless intensity of Romeo and Juliet in this searing, gorgeously written novel that perfectly captures the ferocity of young love.

Get Lucky

Get Lucky
Author: Katherine Center
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2010-04-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345507916

How do you change your luck? A young woman chooses to look for happiness in this marvelously entertaining and poignant novel from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Walk Away and Things You Save in a Fire. “A hilarious and touching take on what it means to be a grown-up.”—Julie Buxbaum, author of Admission and Tell Me Three Things Sarah Harper isn’t sure if the stupid decisions she sometimes makes are good choices in disguise—or if they’re really just stupid. But either way, after forwarding an inappropriate email to her entire company, she suddenly finds herself out of a job. So she goes home to Houston—and her sister, Mackie—for Thanksgiving. But before Sarah can share her troubles with her sister, she learns that Mackie has some woes of her own: After years of trying, Mackie’s given up on having a baby—and plans to sell on eBay the entire nursery she’s set up. Which gives Sarah a brilliant idea—an idea that could fix everyone’s problems. An idea that gives Sarah the chance to take care of her big sister for once—instead of the other way around. But nothing worthwhile is ever easy. After a decade away, Sarah is forced to confront one ghost from her past after another: the father she’s lost touch with, the memories of her mother, the sweet guy she dumped horribly in high school. Soon everything that matters is on the line—and Sarah can only hope that by changing her life she has changed her luck, too.

The Texas Rangers

The Texas Rangers
Author: Mike Cox
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2008-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780312873868

Explores the history of the Texas Rangers from their origin in 1821 to protect the settlers from the Karankawa Indians, and describes how they became one of the fiercest law enforcement groups in America.

Historic Photos of Dallas in the 50s, 60s, and 70s

Historic Photos of Dallas in the 50s, 60s, and 70s
Author: Rusty Williams
Publisher: Turner
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Dallas (Tex.)
ISBN: 9781596527423

In 1950 Dallas was a spirited Texas town of some regional importance; by 1980 it was an international city, one of the nation's most populous, a center of trade, transportation, finance, pro sports, and popular culture. Historic Photos of Dallas in the 50s, 60s, and 70s documents this amazing transformation with seldom-seen photographs of the period. Nearly 200 historic images show Dallas in the process of refashioning its skyline, its streets, its institutions, its public behavior, and its sense of self and worth. Historic Photos of Dallas in the 50s, 60s, and 70s blends striking black-and-white images with crisp commentary to chronicle moments of joy, pride, and anguish during these tumultuous decades. This volume takes readers back to the not-so-long-ago Dallas of trolley buses, downtown movie theaters, and four-lane expressways, then shows how the city transcended its parochial beginnings to become one of the most dynamic American cities of the twentieth century.

Horse Crazy

Horse Crazy
Author: Sarah Maslin Nir
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1501196251

There are over seven million horses in America -- even more than when they were the only means of transportation. Nir began riding horses when she was just two years old and hasn't stopped since. This is her funny, moving love letter to these graceful animals and the people who are obsessed with them. She takes us into the lesser-known corners of the riding world and profiles some of its most captivating figures, and speaks candidly of how horses have helped her overcome heartbreak and loss.