Author: Sarah Ragland Jackson
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585444564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Karle Wilson Baker was the best-known Texas poet of the early twentieth century. Yet, while many of her male contemporaries remain well known to Texas literature, she is not. Her energy and significant role in shaping the literature of Texas equaled those of Walter Prescott Webb or J. Frank Dobie, with whom she ranked as the first Fellows of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her modern lifestyle as an independent, “new” woman and her active career as a writer, teacher, and lecturer placed her among the avant-garde of women in the nation, although she lived in the small town of Nacogdoches. She was a multi-talented writer with a wide range of interests, yet she championed Texas and the history and natural beauty of East Texas above all else. Sarah R. Jackson’s thoroughly researched biography of Karle Wilson Baker introduces her to a new generation. Baker’s life also opens a window onto the literary times in which she lived and particularly the path of a woman making her way in the largely male-dominated world of nationally acclaimed writers. Beyond the literary insights this book offers, Jackson spotlights developments in East Texas such as the discovery of oil and the founding of what would become Stephen F. Austin State University in Baker’s hometown. Extensive work in a number of regional and state archives and interviews with many who remembered Baker allow Jackson to offer an account that is not only thorough but also lively and entertaining.
Author: Karen Kossie-Chernyshev
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603449981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Born in the 1880s in Jefferson, Texas, Lillian B. Jones Horace grew up in Fort Worth and dreamed of being a college-educated teacher, a goal she achieved. But life was hard for her and other blacks living and working in the Jim Crow South. Her struggles convinced her that education, particularly that involving the printed word, was the key to black liberation. In 1916, before Marcus Garvey gained fame for advocating black economic empowerment and a repatriation movement, Horace wrote a back-to-Africa novel, Five Generations Hence, the earliest published novel on record by a black woman from Texas and the earliest known utopian novel by any African American woman. She also wrote a biography of Lacey Kirk Williams, a renowned president of the National Baptist Convention; another novel, Angie Brown, that was never published; and a host of plays that her students at I. M. Terrell High School performed. Five Generations Hence languished after its initial publication. Along with Horace’s diary, the unpublished novel, and the Williams biography, the book was consigned to a collection owned by the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society and housed at the Fort Worth Public Library. There, scholar and author Karen Kossie-Chernyshev rediscovered Horace’s work in the course of her efforts to track down and document a literary tradition that has been largely ignored by both the scholarly community and general readers. In this book, the full text of Horace’s Five Generations Hence, annotated and contextualized by Kossie-Chernyshev, is once again presented for examination by scholars and interested readers.In 2009 Kossie-Chernyshev invited nine scholars to a conference at Texas Southern University to give Horace’s works a comprehensive interdisciplinary examination. Subsequent work on those papers resulted in the studies that form the second half of this book.
Author: James M. Smallwood
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781603440172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Marauding outlaws, or violent rebels still bent on fighting the Civil War? For decades, the so-called “Taylor-Sutton feud” has been seen as a bloody vendetta between two opposing gangs of Texas gunfighters. However, historian James M. Smallwood here shows that what seemed to be random lawlessness can be interpreted as a pattern of rebellion by a loose confederation of desperadoes who found common cause in their hatred of the Reconstruction government in Texas. Between the 1850s and 1880, almost 200 men rode at one time or another with Creed Taylor and his family through a forty-five-county area of Texas, stealing and killing almost at will, despite heated and often violent opposition from pro-Union law enforcement officials, often led by William Sutton. From 1871 until his eventual arrest, notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin served as enforcer for the Taylors. In 1874 in the streets of Comanche, Texas, on his twenty-first birthday, Hardin and two other members of the Taylor ring gunned down Brown County Deputy Charlie Webb. This cold-blooded killing—one among many—marked the beginning of the end for the Taylor ring, and Hardin eventually went to the penitentiary as a result. The Feud That Wasn’t reinforces the interpretation that Reconstruction was actually just a continuation of the Civil War in another guise, a thesis Smallwood has advanced in other books and articles. He chronicles in vivid detail the cattle rustling, horse thieving, killing sprees, and attacks on law officials perpetrated by the loosely knit Taylor ring, drawing a composite picture of a group of anti-Reconstruction hoodlums who at various times banded together for criminal purposes. Western historians and those interested in gunfighters and lawmen will heartily enjoy this colorful and meticulously researched narrative.
Author: Karle Wilson Baker
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585445066
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
In the intimate language of one who watched birds daily, Karle Wilson Baker brought readers face to face with the wonders of the East Texas woods in the 1930s. She wrote about tiny warblers, industrious chickadees, and purple finches; the aery trills and tantalizing color flashes of the hummingbirds; the bell tones of the wood thrush; the daily visits and rare drop-ins of the prolific bird life of the region. In a daily diary she kept throughout her life, Baker recorded her observations of the many birds that lived in the heavily wooded setting of her Nacogdoches home, called Tanglewood. When her family moved from the house, she collected her essays on bird life into this volume, illustrated by her daughter Charlotte and published in 1930. Her little classic speaks with the voice of her times to readers today who enjoy their avian companions.
Author: Angela Boswell
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623497078
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Winner, 2019 Liz Carpenter Award, sponsored by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) In recent decades, a small but growing number of historians have dedicated their tireless attention to analyzing the role of women in Texas history. Each contribution—and there have been many—represents a brick in the wall of new Texas history. From early Native societies to astronauts, Women in Texas History assembles those bricks into a carefully crafted structure as the first book to cover the full scope of Texas women’s history. By emphasizing the differences between race and ethnicity, Angela Boswell uses three broad themes to tie together the narrative of women in Texas history. First, the physical and geographic challenges of Texas as a place significantly affected women’s lives, from the struggles of isolated frontier farming to the opportunities and problems of increased urbanization. Second, the changing landscape of legal and political power continued to shape women’s lives and opportunities, from the ballot box to the courthouse and beyond. Finally, Boswell demonstrates the powerful influence of social and cultural forces on the identity, agency, and everyday life of women in Texas. In challenging male-dominated legal and political systems, Texan women shaped (and were shaped by) class, religion, community organizations, literary and artistic endeavors, and more. Women in Texas History is the first book to narrate the entire span of Texas women’s history and marks a major achievement in telling the full story of the Lone Star State. Historians and general readers alike will find this book an informative and enjoyable read for anyone interested in the history of Texas or the history of women.
Author: Betty Holland Wiesepape
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292742983
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Winifred Sanford is generally regarded by critics as one of the best and most important early twentieth-century Texas women writers, despite publishing only a handful of short stories before slipping into relative obscurity. First championed by her mentor, H. L. Mencken, and published in his magazine, The American Mercury, many of Sanford’s stories were set during the Texas oil boom of the 1920s and 1930s and offer a unique perspective on life in the boomtowns during that period. Four of her stories were included in The Best American Short Stories of 1926. Questioning the sudden end to Sanford’s writing career, Wiesepape, a leading literary historian of Texas women writers, delved into the author’s previously unexamined private papers and emerged with an insightful and revealing study that sheds light on both Sanford’s abbreviated career and the domestic lives of women at the time. The first in-depth account of Sanford’s life and work, Wiesepape’s biography discusses Sanford’s fiction through the lens of the sociohistorical contexts that shaped and inspired it. In addition, Wiesepape has included two previously unpublished stories as well as eighteen previously unpublished letters to Sanford from Mencken. Winifred Sanford is an illuminating biography of one of the state’s unsung literary jewels and an important and much-needed addition to the often overlooked field of Texas women’s writing.
Author: Walter L. Buenger
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603442359
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
In 1991 Walter L. Buenger and the late Robert A. Calvert compiled a pioneering work in Texas historiography: Texas Through Time, a seminal survey and critique of the field of Texas history from its inception through the end of the 1980s. Now, Buenger and Arnoldo De León have assembled an important new collection that assesses the current state of Texas historiography, building on the many changes in understanding and interpretation that have developed in the nearly twenty years since the publication of the original volume. This new work, Beyond Texas Through Time, departs from the earlier volume’s emphasis on the dichotomy between traditionalism and revisionism as they applied to various eras. Instead, the studies in this book consider the topical and thematic understandings of Texas historiography embraced by a new generation of Texas historians as they reflect analytically on the work of the past two decades. The resulting approaches thus offer the potential of informing the study of themes and topics other than those specifically introduced in this volume, extending its usefulness well beyond a review of the literature. In addition, the volume editors’ introduction proposes the application of cultural constructionism as an important third perspective on the thematic and topical analyses provided by the other contributors. Beyond Texas Through Time offers both a vantage point and a benchmark, serving as an important reference for scholars and advanced students of history and historiography, even beyond the borders of Texas.
Author: Marti Corn
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623497698
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
In 1871, newly freed slaves established the community of Tamina—then called “Tammany”—north of Houston, Texas, near the rich timberlands of Montgomery County. Located in proximity to the just-completed railroad from Conroe to Houston, the community benefited from the burgeoning local lumber industry and available transportation. The residents built homes, churches, a one-room school, and a general store. In the decades since, urban growth and change have overtaken Tamina. The sprawling communities of The Woodlands, Shenandoah, Chateau Woods, and Oak Ridge have encroached, introducing both new prospects and troubling complications, as the residents of this rural community enjoy both the benefits and the challenges of urban life. On the one hand, the children of Tamina have the opportunity to attend some of the best public schools in the nation; on the other hand, residents whose education and job skills have not kept pace with modern society are struggling for survival. Through striking and intimate photography and sensitively gleaned oral histories, author Marti Corn has chronicled the lives, dreams, and spirit of the people of Tamina. The result is a multi-faceted portrait of community, kinship, values, and a shared history. In 2016, the book cover portrait of Tamina resident Johnny Jones was featured at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. This second edition of Corn’s classic photographic essays and interviews with Tamina residents includes a helpful classroom guide for collecting and studying oral history. The result is a rich new resource that affords readers a window into a little-understood part of our shared past.
Author: Philip Robert Caudill
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 160344615X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
Reveals a detailed portrait of a fascinating Texan, William Duncan-- businessman, county sheriff, cattleman, and Confederate officer-- capturing his wartime emotions and his postwar struggles to reinvent the lifestyle he knew before the war. Also explores the everyday life of the Anglo-Texans who settled the Mexican land grants in the early nineteenth century and subsequently became citizens of the proudly independent Texas Republic.
Author: Angela Boswell
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585441280
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Deeds, wills, divorce decrees, and other evidence of the public lives of nineteenth-century women belie the long-held beliefs of their public invisibility. Angela Boswell's Her Act and Deed: Women's Lives in a Rural Southern County, 1837-1873 follows the threads of Southern women's lives as they weave through the public records of one Texas county during the middle of the nineteenth century. Her unique approach to exploring women's roles in a South that spanned the frontier, antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras illuminates the truths of the feminine world of those periods, and her analysis of this set of complete public records for those years challenges the theory of men's and women's separate spheres of influence, as advanced by many scholars. The world Boswell reconstructs allows readers a more egalitarian, multicultural look at life: working class and poor women, both black and white, join their more affluent sisters in the pages of the Colorado County, Texas, courthouse records. Those same records reveal that the men of that world--most of them planters or farmers, the majority of them owning at least a few slaves--are a force for women to reckon with, both in public and at home. The almost constant presence of men in the home and their need to uphold the dominant, slave-holding hierarchy produced a patriarchy more pervasive than that experienced by women in the urban north. Eminently readable and accessible to scholars and general readers alike, Her Act and Deed represents a welcome addition to the classroom, to the scholar's library, and to Texas history collections.
