Fifty Years of the Texas Observer

Fifty Years of the Texas Observer PDF Author: Char Miller
Publisher: Trinity University Press
ISBN: 1595340874
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
For the past five decades the Texas Observer has been an essential voice in Texas culture and politics, championing honest government, civil rights, labor, and the environment, while providing a platform for many of the state’s most passionate and progressive voices. Included are ninety-one selections from Roy Bedichek, Lou Dubose, Ronnie Dugger, Dagoberto Gilb, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Larry McMurtry, Maury Maverick Jr., Willie Morris, Debbie Nathan, and others. To mark the Observer’s fiftieth anniversary, Char Miller has selected a cross section of the best work to appear in its pages. Not only does the collection pay homage to an important alternative voice in Texas journalism, it also serves as a progressive chronicle of a half-century of life in the Lone Star State—a state that has spawned three presidents in the last forty years. If Texas is, as some say, a crucible for national politics, then Fifty Years of the Texas Observer can be read as a casebook for issues that concern citizens in all fifty states. Molly Ivins's foreword gives historical background for the Observer and sets the stage for the book.

Fifty Years of the Texas Observer

Fifty Years of the Texas Observer PDF Author: Char Miller
Publisher: Trinity University Press
ISBN: 1595340874
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Get Book Here

Book Description
For the past five decades the Texas Observer has been an essential voice in Texas culture and politics, championing honest government, civil rights, labor, and the environment, while providing a platform for many of the state’s most passionate and progressive voices. Included are ninety-one selections from Roy Bedichek, Lou Dubose, Ronnie Dugger, Dagoberto Gilb, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Larry McMurtry, Maury Maverick Jr., Willie Morris, Debbie Nathan, and others. To mark the Observer’s fiftieth anniversary, Char Miller has selected a cross section of the best work to appear in its pages. Not only does the collection pay homage to an important alternative voice in Texas journalism, it also serves as a progressive chronicle of a half-century of life in the Lone Star State—a state that has spawned three presidents in the last forty years. If Texas is, as some say, a crucible for national politics, then Fifty Years of the Texas Observer can be read as a casebook for issues that concern citizens in all fifty states. Molly Ivins's foreword gives historical background for the Observer and sets the stage for the book.

A journal of free voices

A journal of free voices PDF Author: Richard Ray Cole
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description


The Mexican American Experience in Texas

The Mexican American Experience in Texas PDF Author: Martha Menchaca
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477324372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
A historical overview of Mexican Americans' social and economic experiences in Texas For hundreds of years, Mexican Americans in Texas have fought against political oppression and exclusion—in courtrooms, in schools, at the ballot box, and beyond. Through a detailed exploration of this long battle for equality, this book illuminates critical moments of both struggle and triumph in the Mexican American experience. Martha Menchaca begins with the Spanish settlement of Texas, exploring how Mexican Americans’ racial heritage limited their incorporation into society after the territory’s annexation. She then illustrates their political struggles in the nineteenth century as they tried to assert their legal rights of citizenship and retain possession of their land, and goes on to explore their fight, in the twentieth century, against educational segregation, jury exclusion, and housing covenants. It was only in 1967, she shows, that the collective pressure placed on the state government by Mexican American and African American activists led to the beginning of desegregation. Menchaca concludes with a look at the crucial roles that Mexican Americans have played in national politics, education, philanthropy, and culture, while acknowledging the important work remaining to be done in the struggle for equality.

Midcentury Modern Art in Texas

Midcentury Modern Art in Texas PDF Author: Katie Robinson Edwards
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292756593
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Before Abstract Expressionism of New York City was canonized as American postwar modernism, the United States was filled with localized manifestations of modern art. One such place where considerable modernist activity occurred was Texas, where artists absorbed and interpreted the latest, most radical formal lessons from Mexico, the East Coast, and Europe, while still responding to the state's dramatic history and geography. This barely known chapter in the story of American art is the focus of Midcentury Modern Art in Texas. Presenting new research and artwork that has never before been published, Katie Robinson Edwards examines the contributions of many modernist painters and sculptors in Texas, with an emphasis on the era's most abstract and compelling artists. Edwards looks first at the Dallas Nine and the 1936 Texas Centennial, which offered local artists a chance to take stock of who they were and where they stood within the national artistic setting. She then traces the modernist impulse through various manifestations, including the foundations of early Texas modernism in Houston; early practitioners of abstraction and non-objectivity; the Fort Worth Circle; artists at the University of Texas at Austin; Houston artists in the 1950s; sculpture in and around an influential Fort Worth studio; and, to see how some Texas artists fared on a national scale, the Museum of Modern Art's "Americans" exhibitions. The first full-length treatment of abstract art in Texas during this vital and canon-defining period, Midcentury Modern Art in Texas gives these artists their due place in American art, while also valuing the quality of Texan-ness that subtly undergirds much of their production.

Turning Texas Blue

Turning Texas Blue PDF Author: Mary Beth Rogers
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466891718
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
In the 2014 midterm election, Democrats in Texas did not receive even 40 percent of the statewide vote; Republicans swept the tables both in Texas and nationally. But even after two decades of democratic losses, there is a path to turn Texas blue, argues Mary Beth Rogers - if Democrats are smart enough to see and follow it. Rogers is the last person to successfully campaign-manage a Democrat, Governor Ann Richards, to the statehouse in Austin. In a lively narrative, Rogers tells the story of how Texas moved so far to the right in such a short time and how Democrats might be able to move it back to the center. And, argues Rogers, that will mean a lot more of an effort than simply waiting for the state's demographics to shift even further towards Hispanics - a risky proposition at best. Rogers identifies a ten-point path for Texas Democrats to win at the statewide level and to build a base vote that would allow Texas to become a swing-vote player in national politics once again. One part of that shift starts with local Democratic candidates in local Republican communities making the connection between controversial local issues or problems and the statewide Republican policies that ignore or create them. For example, in a 2014 election in Denton-a Republican suburb-voters approved Texas's first ban on hydraulic fracking. The next day, though, a Republican Texas agency official announced that Texas would not honor the town's vote to ban. No democratic candidate picked up the issue. Change won't come easily, argues Rogers. But if Texas shifts to even a pale shade of purple, it changes everything in American politics today.

At Swim, Two Boys

At Swim, Two Boys PDF Author: Jamie O'Neill
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743222946
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description
Two young men, Jim, the naive, scholarly son of a Dublin shopkeeper, and Doyler, a rough working boy, struggle with issues of political, religious, and sexual identity in the year leading up to the Easter uprising of 1916.

Usual Cruelty

Usual Cruelty PDF Author: Alec Karakatsanis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781620979143
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A "searing, searching, and eloquent" (Martha Minow, Harvard Law School) investigation into the role of the legal profession in perpetuating mass incarceration--now in an accessible paperback format from the award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings--an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color, for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty offers a radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively--and wildly successfully--challenging it. Hailed by luminaries from James Forman Jr. and Vanita Gupta to U.S. Circuit Judge Bernice Donald, and MacArthur Award-winning poet and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts, Usual Cruelty offers a condemnation of the whole deplorable enterprise, starting with profound questions about the specific things our system chooses to criminalize (marijuana plants, low-level gambling, petty theft) versus those we don't (tobacco plants, high-level gambling by bankers, massive wage theft by employers). It calls out a bail system that charges people money to go free despite the lack of any evidence this will make them more likely to show up in court or make anybody safer. And it explores the everyday brutality of our courts, prisons, and jails, and the ways in which the legal profession has allowed itself to become desensitized to the everyday pain these institutions inflict on our most vulnerable populations. Now in an accessible paperback format, Usual Cruelty will cement Karakatsanis's reputation as one of the most inspiring civil rights lawyers of our time.

Tulia

Tulia PDF Author: Nate Blakeslee
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786735465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
This true story of race and injustice in a small west Texas town "resembles . . . a modern day To Kill a Mockingbird -- or would, that is, if the novel were a true story and Atticus had won" (New York Times Book Review) In the summer of 1999, in the tiny west Texas town of Tulia, thirty-nine people, almost all of them black, were arrested and charged with dealing powdered cocaine. At trial, the prosecution relied almost solely on the uncorroborated, and contradictory, testimony of one police officer. Despite the flimsiness of the evidence against them, virtually all of the defendants were convicted and given sentences as high as ninety-nine years. Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas prize for excellence in nonfiction, Tulia is the story of this town, the bust, the trials, and the heroic legal battle that ultimately led to the reversal of the convictions. But the story is much bigger than the tale of just one bust. As Tulia makes clear, these events are the latest chapter in a story with themes as old as the country itself. It is a gripping, marvelously well-told tale about injustice, race, poverty, hysteria, and desperation in rural America.

The Texas Observer

The Texas Observer PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Collecting the Imagination

Collecting the Imagination PDF Author: Megan Barnard
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292714892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the world's preeminent institutions for the study of literature, photography, and the humanities. The Ransom Center is renowned for its remarkable collections of literary manuscripts, rare books, photographs, art, and film and performing arts materials. Founded in 1957 with a core collection of rare books, the Ransom Center has expanded its holdings at a phenomenal rate, so that it now houses 36 million leaves of manuscripts, 1 million rare books, 5 million photographs, and one hundred thousand works of art. Among its most famous holdings are a Gutenberg Bible; the Helmut Gernsheim Collection, a major photohistorical archive that contains the world's first photograph (ca. 1826); the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library of Early English Literature; the Watergate papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; the archive and costume collection of Robert De Niro; and the personal literary archives of hundreds of major twentieth-century writers, from Samuel Beckett and James Joyce to Tom Stoppard and Norman Mailer. This volume celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Harry Ransom Center. Staff members describe the Center's founding, the remarkable growth of its collections as part of a thoughtful and deliberate acquisition plan, and its extensive outreach to scholars, students, and the general public. They pay tribute to the leadership of Harry Ransom, who conceived the idea of a research center in the humanities that would be for the state of Texas what the Bibliothèque Nationale is for France. The authors also tell fascinating stories of how individual collections and archives were acquired, as well as some of the controversies and myths that have arisen as a result of the Ransom Center's liberal spending and rapid growth. Photographs of treasures from the Ransom Center and key figures in its history round out this lovely and authoritative volume.