Author: Bruce A. Glasrud
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781603440417
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Founded in 1962, the East Texas Historical Journal began accepting articles on African American history at a time when most scholarly journals considered the topic out of the mainstream, at best. Since that beginning, the journal has published some forty articles in the field. Now, Bruce A. Glasrud and Archie P. McDonald have gathered a collection of some of the best articles on black history from the East Texas Historical Journal; their samplings span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and cover the principal themes and topics of African American history in the eastern portion of the Lone Star State. The book concludes with a listing of all articles on African American history from the East Texas Historical Journal. Blacks in East Texas History will enlighten and inform students and scholars of regional and African American history, as well as those interested in the trials and progress of African Americans in the American South and Southwest.
Author: John T. Whatley
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807171328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
During six months in 1862, William Jefferson Whatley and his wife, Nancy Falkaday Watkins Whatley, exchanged a series of letters that vividly demonstrate the quickly changing roles of women whose husbands left home to fight in the Civil War. When William Whatley enlisted with the Confederate Army in 1862, he left his young wife Nancy in charge of their cotton farm in East Texas, near the village of Caledonia in Rusk County. In letters to her husband, Nancy describes in elaborate detail how she dealt with and felt about her new role, which thrust her into an array of unfamiliar duties, including dealing with increasingly unruly slaves, overseeing the harvest of the cotton crop, and negotiating business transactions with unscrupulous neighbors. At the same time, she carried on her traditional family duties and tended to their four young children during frequent epidemics of measles and diphtheria. Stationed hundreds of miles away, her husband could only offer her advice, sympathy, and shared frustration. In An East Texas Family’s Civil War, the Whatleys’ great-grandson, John T. Whatley, transcribes and annotates these letters for the first time. Notable for their descriptions of the unraveling of the local slave labor system and accounts of rural southern life, Nancy’s letters offer a rare window on the hardships faced by women on the home front taking on unprecedented responsibilities and filling unfamiliar roles.
Author: Tex Midkiff
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 146714603X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
The heritage of East Texas partakes in the same degree of unexpected turns and hidden depths as its backroads and bayous. One line of inquiry meanders into another. Start out searching for La Salle's grave and end up chasing Spanish gold in Upshur County. From Sam Houston's Bible to the Longview nightclub that hosted both Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, one tale follows another and introduces a cast of characters that includes Candace and Peter Ellis Bean, Old Rip, Jack Lummus and Vernon Wayne Howell. Part the Pine Curtain with Tex Midkiff for a history as heated as the La Grange Chicken Ranch's parlor and irresistible as a batch of Golden sweet potatoes.
Author: Bill O'Neal
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574417398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
From 1840 through 1844 East Texas was wracked by murderous violence between Regulator and Moderator factions. More than thirty men were killed in assassinations, lynchings, ambushes, street fights, and pitched battles. The sheriff of Harrison County was murdered, and so was the founder of Marshall, as well as a former district judge. Senator Robert Potter, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, was slain by Regulators near his Caddo Lake home. Courts ceased to operate and anarchy reigned in Shelby County, Panola District, and Harrison County. Only the personal intervention of President Sam Houston and an invasion of the militia of the Republic of Texas halted the bloodletting. The Regulator-Moderator War was the first and largest—in numbers of participants and fatalities—of the many blood feuds of Texas, and Bill O'Neal's book is the first detailed account of this feud. He has included numerous photographs, maps to help the reader to identify various locations of specific events, and rosters of names of the Regulator and Moderator factions arranged by the counties in which the individuals were associated—along with a roster of the victims of the war.
Author: Thad Sitton
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292777809
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
A comprehensive history of the sawmill towns of East Texas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sawmill communities were once the thriving centers of East Texas life. Many sprang up almost overnight in a pine forest clearing, and many disappeared just as quickly after the company “cut out” its last trees. But during their heyday, these company towns made Texas the nation’s third-largest lumber producer and created a colorful way of life that lingers in the memories of the remaining former residents and their children and grandchildren. Drawing on oral history, company records, and other archival sources, Sitton and Conrad recreate the lifeways of the sawmill communities. They describe the companies that ran the mills and the different kinds of jobs involved in logging and milling. They depict the usually rough-hewn towns, with their central mill, unpainted houses, company store, and schools, churches, and community centers. And they characterize the lives of the people, from the hard, awesomely dangerous mill work to the dances, picnics, and other recreations that offered welcome diversions. Winner, T. H. Fehrenbach Award, Texas Historical Commission “After completing the book, I truly understood life in the sawmill communities, intellectually and emotionally. It was very satisfying. Conrad and Sitton write in such a manner to make one feel the hard life, smell the sawdust, and share the danger of the mills. The book is compelling and stimulating.” —Robert L. Schaadt, Director-Archivist, Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780881070576
Category : Walker County (Tex.)
Languages : en
Pages : 964
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Book Description
Author: Richard Orton
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574415719
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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Book Description
Guss, Felix, and Jim Upshaw founded the community of County Line in the 1870s in northwest Nacogdoches County, in deep East Texas. As with hundreds of other relatively autonomous black communities created at that time, the Upshaws sought a safe place to raise their children and create a livelihood during Reconstruction and Jim Crow Texas. In the late 1980s photographer Richard Orton visited County Line for the first time and became aware of a world he did not know existed as a white man. He went down the rabbit hole, so to speak, and met some remarkable people there who changed his life. The more than 50 duotone photographs and text convey the contemporary experience of growing up in a "freedom colony." Covering a period of twenty-five years, photographer Richard Orton juxtaposes his images with text from people who grew up in and have remained connected to their birthplace. Thad Sitton's foreword sets the community in historical context and Roy Flukinger points out the beauty of the documentary photographs. This book should appeal to anyone interested in American or Texas history, particularly the history of African Americans in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. The book should also be of interest to anyone with an appreciation for documentary photography, including students and teachers of photography.
Author: Max Krochmal
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477323791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
Not one but two civil rights movements flourished in mid-twentieth century Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation with one another. Far from the gaze of the national media, African American and Mexican American activists combated the twin caste systems of Jim Crow and Juan Crow. These insurgents worked chiefly within their own racial groups, yet they also looked to each other for guidance and, at times, came together in solidarity. The movements sought more than integration and access: they demanded power and justice. Civil Rights in Black and Brown draws on more than 500 oral history interviews newly collected across Texas, from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods and everywhere in between. The testimonies speak in detail to the structure of racism in small towns and huge metropolises—both the everyday grind of segregation and the haunting acts of racial violence that upheld Texas’s state-sanctioned systems of white supremacy. Through their memories of resistance and revolution, the activists reveal previously undocumented struggles for equity, as well as the links Black and Chicanx organizers forged in their efforts to achieve self-determination.
Author: Robert Cargill
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
ISBN: 9781622884025
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
It was 1946. World War II was over. The thieves went to work. They drilled deviated wells from outside the East Texas Oil Field back into the oil that remained after 16 years of production. This was the oil field that supplied the oil needed for an Allied victory in 1945. The deviators continued their nefarious activity until an angry and aggressive attorney general led his posse of lawmen, including the Texas Rangers, into East Texas to stop the theft and administer Texas justice. I tell this story on the basis of 35 years of research and my father's well files. Yes, he drilled six of the nearly 400 deviated wells. I first learned of the so-called Slant-Hole scandal in late spring 1962. That's when colleagues in my research group at the University of California at Berkeley accosted me with the morning's San Francisco Chronicle. They knew my father was an East Texas oilman. One pointed to an article reporting that oilmen in East Texas had drilled "deviated" oil wells from beyond the known productive limits of the East Texas Oil Field to steal oil. "Has your dad been stealing oil?" "Of course, not!" I replied. I had known nothing of the illicit activity until that morning. Then a report in TIME further exposed the East Texas oil scandal that had erupted in my hometown of Longview. Here, then, for the first time, I reveal the story of how a few dozen oilmen stole up to 20 million barrels from the East Texas Oil Field. I am eager to share what I have learned and to tell the truth of the slant-hole scandal--the circumstances that made it inevitable, who did what to whom, and how the matter eventually reached its conclusion. Much of what I reveal in this book has been the tightly guarded secrets of the families of the participants so that grandchildren can be kept from knowledge of granddaddy's scandalous behavior. But most of what I reveal here lies barely hidden in the public record. The slant-hole story is a significant piece of Texas history, and it must be told before no one is left to tell it.
Author: Jody Edward Ginn
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806165472
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
When the gun smoke cleared, four men were found dead at the hardware store in a rural East Texas town. But this December 1934 shootout was no anomaly. San Augustine County had seen at least three others in the previous three years, and these murders in broad daylight were only the latest development in the decade-long rule of the criminal McClanahan-Burleson gang. Armed with handguns, Jim Crow regulations, and corrupt special Ranger commissions from infamous governors “Ma” and “Pa” Ferguson, the gang racketeered and bootlegged its way into power in San Augustine County, where it took up robbing and extorting local black sharecroppers as its main activity. After the hardware store shootings, white community leaders, formerly silenced by fear of the gang’s retribution, finally sought state intervention. In 1935, fresh-faced, newly elected governor James V. Allred made good on his promise to reform state law enforcement agencies by sending a team of qualified Texas Rangers to San Augustine County to investigate reports of organized crime. In East Texas Troubles, historian Jody Edward Ginn tells of their year-and-a-half-long cleanup of the county, the inaugural effort in Governor Allred’s transformation of the Texas Rangers into a professional law enforcement agency. Besides foreshadowing the wholesale reform of state law enforcement, the Allred Rangers’ investigative work in San Augustine marked a rare close collaboration between white law enforcement officers and black residents. Drawing on firsthand accounts and the sworn testimony of black and white residents in the resulting trials, Ginn examines the consequences of such cooperation in a region historically entrenched in racial segregation. In this story of a rural Texas community’s resurrection, Ginn reveals a multifaceted history of the reform of the Texas Rangers and of an unexpected alliance between the legendary frontier lawmen and black residents of the Jim Crow South.
