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.
Author: Jody Edward Ginn
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806165790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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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.
Author: Patrick Tyler
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429930853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 653
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Book Description
A spellbinding narrative account of America in the Middle East that "reads almost like a thriller" (The Economist) The Middle East is the beginning and the end of U.S. foreign policy: events there influence our alliances, make or break presidencies, govern the price of oil, and draw us into war. But it was not always so—and as Patrick Tyler shows in A World of Trouble, a thrilling chronicle of American misadventures in the region. The story of American presidents' dealings there is one of mixed motives, skulduggery, deceit, and outright foolishness, as well as of policymaking and diplomacy. Tyler draws on newly opened presidential archives to dramatize the approach to the Middle East across U.S. presidencies from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. He takes us into the Oval Office and shows how our leaders made momentous decisions; at the same time, the sweep of this narrative—from the Suez crisis to the Iran hostage crisis to George W. Bush's catastrophe in Iraq—lets us see the big picture as never before. Tyler tells a story of presidents being drawn into the affairs of the region against their will, being kept in the dark by local potentates, being led astray by grasping subordinates, and making decisions about the internal affairs of countries they hardly understand. Above all, he shows how each president has managed to undo the policies of his predecessor, often fomenting both anger against America on the streets of the region and confusion at home. A World of Trouble is the Middle East book we need now: compulsively readable, free of cant and ideology, and rich in insight about the very human challenges a new president will face as he or she tries to restore America's standing in the region.
Author: Doug J. Swanson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101979879
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
“Swanson has done a crucial public service by exposing the barbarous side of the Rangers.” —The New York Times Book Review A twenty-first century reckoning with the legendary Texas Rangers that does justice to their heroic moments while also documenting atrocities, brutality, oppression, and corruption The Texas Rangers came to life in 1823, when Texas was still part of Mexico. Nearly 200 years later, the Rangers are still going--one of the most famous of all law enforcement agencies. In Cult of Glory, Doug J. Swanson has written a sweeping account of the Rangers that chronicles their epic, daring escapades while showing how the white and propertied power structures of Texas used them as enforcers, protectors and officially sanctioned killers. Cult of Glory begins with the Rangers' emergence as conquerors of the wild and violent Texas frontier. They fought the fierce Comanches, chased outlaws, and served in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War. As Texas developed, the Rangers were called upon to catch rustlers, tame oil boomtowns, and patrol the perilous Texas-Mexico border. In the 1930s they began their transformation into a professionally trained police force. Countless movies, television shows, and pulp novels have celebrated the Rangers as Wild West supermen. In many cases, they deserve their plaudits. But often the truth has been obliterated. Swanson demonstrates how the Rangers and their supporters have operated a propaganda machine that turned agency disasters and misdeeds into fables of triumph, transformed murderous rampages--including the killing of scores of Mexican civilians--into valorous feats, and elevated scoundrels to sainthood. Cult of Glory sets the record straight. Beginning with the Texas Indian wars, Cult of Glory embraces the great, majestic arc of Lone Star history. It tells of border battles, range disputes, gunslingers, massacres, slavery, political intrigue, race riots, labor strife, and the dangerous lure of celebrity. And it reveals how legends of the American West--the real and the false--are truly made.
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: Elmer Kelton
Publisher: Forge Books
ISBN: 1429912758
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 704
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Book Description
In 1999, with Forge's publication of The Buckskin Line, Elmer Kelton launched a series of novels on the formative years of the Texas Rangers. In Texas Justice, the first three of these critically acclaimed books are now brought together in a single volume. In The Buckskin Line, Kelton introduces the red-haired boy captured by a Comanche war party after the massacre of his family. Rescued by Mike Shannon, a member of a Texas "ranging company" protecting settlers from Indian raids, the boy known as Rusty is adopted by the Shannon family. In 1861, Mike Shannon is ambushed and killed, and Rusty follows in his footsteps and joins the Rangers. In the throes of the coming War Between the States, Rusty searches for the Confederates who lynched his adoptive father and awaits meeting the Comanche warrior who killed his family two decades past. At the end of the Civil War, Rusty Shannon is thrown adrift when the Rangers are disbanded, and makes his way to his home on the Red River, where he hopes to marry the girl he left behind, Geneva Monahan. But as Badger Boy, the second novel of the saga, unfolds, Geneva has married another man in Rusty's absence. Faced with this betrayal, he must contend with the hate-filled Confederate and Union soldiers infesting Texas and with the continuing Indian raids against innocent settlers. Rusty's own childhood captivity returns to haunt him when he rescues Andy, a white child called Badger Boy by his Comanche captors. In The Way of the Coyote, Andy rides with Rusty Shannon as the Rangers are re-formed in postwar turmoil. With Texas overrun with outlaws, disenfranchised Confederate veterans, nightriders, and marauding Comanche bands, Rusty tries to resume his pre-war life. When his friend Shanty, a freed slave, is burned out of his home by Ku Klux Klan and Rusty's own homestead is confiscated by a murderous band of thugs, he must follow perilous trails before he can put the war and its aftermath behind him. Texas Justice is not only a masterful re-creation of the early years of the Texas Rangers, it is vintage Elmer Kelton, the undisputed master of the Western story. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Author: Gerald Duff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875654355
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Novelist Gerald Duff grew up both in Polk County, in Deep East Texas, and in Nederland, near the Gulf Coast, two drastically different areas in terms of social and economic status, and the way they interact. These communities shaped the way Duff thought and lived, causing him to build up certain false personae to fit in with the crowd. These changes and more are described within the pages of Duff's new memoir, Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory. From dealing with intrusive family members to judgmental classmates to marital bliss and misery, Duff's memoir describes situations familiar to anyone who has ever lived in a small town. Experiences unfamiliar to the youths of today include growing up during World War II and the descriptions of propaganda tactics, hunting for your own meals, and dealing with the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s. Other occurrences however, such as working a summer job and the awkwardness of first dates, speak to people of every generation, young and old. Early in life Duff learned to tell lies as a survival mechanism against his meddling family and occasionally cruel classmates. He describes the ordeal of hiding both his domestic situation and his talent for the written word. Duff's talents for lies and half-truths helped him not only to discover a hidden talent within himself, but also a future career.
Author: Wes Ferguson
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623491274
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Growing up near the Sabine, journalist Wes Ferguson, like most East Texans, steered clear of its murky, debris-filled waters, where alligators lived in the backwater sloughs and an occasional body was pulled from some out-of-the-way crossing. The Sabine held a reputation as a haunt for a handful of hunters and loggers, more than a few water moccasins, swarms of mosquitoes, and the occasional black bear lumbering through swamp oak and cypress knees. But when Ferguson set out to do a series of newspaper stories on the upper portion of the river, he and photographer Jacob Croft Botter were entranced by the river’s subtle beauty and the solitude they found there. They came to admire the self-described “river rats” who hunted, fished, and swapped stories along the muddy water—plain folk who love the Sabine as much as Hill Country vacationers love the clear waters of the Guadalupe. Determined to travel the rest of the river, Ferguson and Botter loaded their gear and launched into the stretch of river that charts the line between the states and ends at the Gulf of Mexico. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.
Author: Brownson Malsch
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806130163
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
Captain M. T. Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, 1st ed. includes bibliographical references index.
Author: Donald E. Reynolds
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American newspapers
Languages : en
Pages : 528
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Book Description
