Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers

Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers PDF Author: Thad Sitton
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292777833
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Around a campfire in the woods through long hours of night, men used to gather to listen to the music of hounds' voices as they chased an elusive and seemingly preternatural fox. To the highly trained ears of these backwoods hunters, the hounds told the story of the pursuit like operatic voices chanting a great epic. Although the hunt almost always ended in the escape of the fox—as the hunters hoped it would—the thrill of the chase made the men feel "that they [were] close to something lost and never to be found, just as one can feel something in a great poem or a dream." Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers offers a colorful account of this vanishing American folkway—back-country fox hunting known as "hilltopping," "moonlighting," "fox racing," or "one-gallus fox hunting." Practiced neither for blood sport nor to put food on the table, hilltopping was worlds removed from elite fox hunting where red- and black-coated horsemen thundered across green fields in daylight. Hilltopping was a nocturnal, even mystical pursuit, uniting men across social and racial lines as they gathered to listen to dogs chasing foxes over miles of ground until the sun rose. Engaged in by thousands of rural and small-town Americans from the 1860s to the 1980s, hilltopping encouraged a quasi-spiritual identification of man with animal that bound its devotees into a "brotherhood of blood and cause" and made them seem almost crazy to outsiders.

Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers

Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers PDF Author: Thad Sitton
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292777833
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
Around a campfire in the woods through long hours of night, men used to gather to listen to the music of hounds' voices as they chased an elusive and seemingly preternatural fox. To the highly trained ears of these backwoods hunters, the hounds told the story of the pursuit like operatic voices chanting a great epic. Although the hunt almost always ended in the escape of the fox—as the hunters hoped it would—the thrill of the chase made the men feel "that they [were] close to something lost and never to be found, just as one can feel something in a great poem or a dream." Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers offers a colorful account of this vanishing American folkway—back-country fox hunting known as "hilltopping," "moonlighting," "fox racing," or "one-gallus fox hunting." Practiced neither for blood sport nor to put food on the table, hilltopping was worlds removed from elite fox hunting where red- and black-coated horsemen thundered across green fields in daylight. Hilltopping was a nocturnal, even mystical pursuit, uniting men across social and racial lines as they gathered to listen to dogs chasing foxes over miles of ground until the sun rose. Engaged in by thousands of rural and small-town Americans from the 1860s to the 1980s, hilltopping encouraged a quasi-spiritual identification of man with animal that bound its devotees into a "brotherhood of blood and cause" and made them seem almost crazy to outsiders.

Coyote Settles the South

Coyote Settles the South PDF Author: John Lane
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820349283
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
The story of Lane's journey as he visits coyote territories: swamps, nature preserves, old farm fields, suburbs, a tannery, and even city streets. Along the way, he gains insight concerning the migration into the Southeast of the American coyote, an animal that, in the end, surprises him with its intelligence, resilience, and amazing adaptability.

Hide, Horn, Fish, and Fowl

Hide, Horn, Fish, and Fowl PDF Author: Kenneth L. Untiedt
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574413201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
No matter how sophisticated or technologically advanced we become, there is still something within that beckons us to "the hunt." This desire creates the customs, beliefs, and rituals related to hunting--for deer, hogs, as well as fish and snakes, etc. These rituals and customs lead to some of our most treasured folklore.

Turning the Pages of Texas

Turning the Pages of Texas PDF Author: Lonn Taylor
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 0875657206
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Turning the Pages of Texas is a collection of sixty essays about Texas books, authors, book collectors, libraries, and bookstores. It is a book for booklovers and bookish readers. Lonn Taylor writes from the point of view of a historian who has been reading books about Texas for seventy years, since he was seven years old, and who has known many of the authors he writes about. He presents his reflections about well-known figures such as John Graves, J. Frank Dobie, and Larry McMurtry. He also introduces readers to people like folklorist C. L. Sonnichsen, who wrote about Texas feuds; Julia Lee Sinks, who interviewed early settlers of Fayette County in the 1870s; Karen Olsson, who wrote a fine novel about the mystique of Austin; and David Dorado Romo, who describes himself as the “psychogeographer of El Paso” and is the grandnephew of a saint. Some of the authors Taylor writes about are truly obscure, like Gertrude Beasley, who published her autobiography in Paris in 1924 and died in a New York insane asylum, or Tony Cano, whose self-published autobiographical novel describes what it was like to be poor and Mexican in West Texas in the 1950s. Taylor also teases out the Texas connections of writers as diverse as William Sydney Porter, Hervey Allen, and H. Allen Smith, and he writes about tracking down Texas books in London and Washington, DC, as well as at Barber’s in Fort Worth, the Brick Row Book Shop in Austin, and Rosengren’s and Brock’s in San Antonio. This is a booklover’s book.

Lone Star Mind

Lone Star Mind PDF Author: Ty Cashion
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806162074
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
There is the story the Lone Star State likes to tell about itself—and then there is the reality, a Texas past that bears little resemblance to the manly Anglo myth of Texas exceptionalism that maintains a firm grip on the state’s historical imagination. Lone Star Mind takes aim at this traditional narrative, holding both academic and lay historians accountable for the ways in which they craft the state’s story. A clear-sighted, far-reaching work of intellectual history, this book marshals a wide array of pertinent scholarship, analysis, and original ideas to point the way toward a new “usable past” that twenty-first-century Texans will find relevant. Ty Cashion fixes T. R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans in his crosshairs in particular, laying bare the conceptual deficiencies of the romantic and mythic narrative the book has served to codify since its first publication in 1968. At the same time, Cashion explores the reasons why the collective efforts of university-trained scholars have failed to diminish the appeal of the state’s iconic popular culture, despite the fuller and more accurate record these historians have produced. Framing the search for a collective Texan identity in the context of a post-Christian age and the end of Anglo-male hegemony, Lone Star Mind illuminates the many historiographical issues besetting the study of American history that will resonate with scholars in other fields as well. Cashion proposes that a cultural history approach focusing on the self-interests of all Texans is capable of telling a more complete story—a story that captures present-day realities.

The World of Antebellum America

The World of Antebellum America PDF Author: Alexandra Kindell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 840

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Book Description
This set provides insight into the lives of ordinary Americans free and enslaved, in farms and cities, in the North and the South, who lived during the years of 1815 to 1860. Throughout the Antebellum Era resonated the theme of change: migration, urban growth, the economy, and the growing divide between North and South all led to great changes to which Americans had to respond. By gathering the important aspects of antebellum Americans' lives into an encyclopedia, The World of Antebellum America provides readers with the opportunity to understand how people across America lived and worked, what politics meant to them, and how they shaped or were shaped by economics. Entries on simple topics such as bread and biscuits explore workers' need for calories, the role of agriculture, and gendered divisions of labor, while entries on more complex topics, such as aging and death, disclose Americans' feelings about life itself. Collectively, the entries pull the reader into the lives of ordinary Americans, while section introductions tie together the entries and provide an overarching narrative that primes readers to understand key concepts about antebellum America before delving into Americans' lives in detail.

Bulldozer Revolutions

Bulldozer Revolutions PDF Author: Andrew C. Baker
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820354155
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
By examining the metropolitan fringes of Houston in Montgomery County, Texas, and Washington, D.C., in Loudoun County, Virginia, this book combines rural, environmental, and agricultural history to disrupt our view of the southern metropolis. Andrew C. Baker examines the local boosters, gentlemen farmers, historical preservationists, and nature-seeking suburbanites who abandoned the city to live in the metropolitan countryside during the twentieth century. These property owners formed the vanguard of the antigrowth movement that has defined metropolitan fringe politics across the nation. In the rural South, subdivisions, reservoirs, homesteads, and historical villages each obscured the troubling legacies of racism and rural poverty and celebrated a refashioned landscape. That landscape’s historical and environmental “authenticity” served as a foil to the alienation and ugliness of suburbia. Using a source base that includes the records of preservation organizations and local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as oral histories, Baker explores the distinct roots of the environmental politics and the shifting relationship between city and country within these metropolitan fringe regions.

The Civil War

The Civil War PDF Author: Army Library (U.S.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description


Rebel

Rebel PDF Author: Kevin H. Siepel
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803233744
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Rebel is the first complete biography of the Confederacy’s best-known partisan commander, John Singleton Mosby, the “Gray Ghost.” A practicing attorney in Virginia and at first a reluctant soldier, in 1861 Mosby took to soldiering with a vengeance, becoming one of the Confederate army’s highest-profile officers, known especially for his cavalry battalion’s continued and effective harassment of Union armies in northern Virginia. Although hunted after the war and regarded, in fact, as the last Confederate officer to surrender, he later became anathema to former Confederates for his willingness to forget the past and his desire to heal the nation’s wounds. Appointed U.S. consul in Hong Kong, he soon initiated an anticorruption campaign that ruined careers in the Far East and Washington. Then, following a stint as a railroad attorney in California, he surfaced again as a government investigator sent by President Theodore Roosevelt to tear down cattlemen’s fences on public lands in the West. Ironically, he ended his career as an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Dude Ranger

The Dude Ranger PDF Author: Zane Grey
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1667600060
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
When Ernest Selby inherits the Red Rock Ranch in Arizona, he learns that the ranch’s twenty thousand cattle have somehow shrunk to six thousand. Is something crooked going on? He hires on as a cowhand under a fake name to investigate.