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Weaving together landscape and memory, this book presents historical photographs of the Rio Grande of the American Southwest. The dynamic Rio Grande has run through all the valley's diverse cultures: Puebloan, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo. Photography arrived in the region at the beginning of the river's great transformation by trade, industry, and cultivation. In Rio Savage has collected images that document the sweeping history of that transformation - from those of nineteenth-century expeditio...

John Potts Slough, the Union commander at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, lived a life of relentless pursuit for success that entangled him in the turbulent events of mid-nineteenth-century America. As a politician, Slough fought abolitionists in the Ohio legislature and during Kansas Territory's fourth and final constitutional convention. He organized the 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry after the Civil War broke out, eventually leading his men against Confederate forces at the pivotal engagement a...

Why did New Mexico remain so long in political limbo before being admitted to the Union as a state? Combining extensive research and a clear and well-organised style, Robert W. Larson provides the answers to this question in a thorough and comprehensive account of the territory's extraordinary sixty-six-year struggle for statehood. This book is no mere chronology of political moves, however. It is the history of a turbulent frontier state, sweeping into the current almost every colourful cha...

The Civil War in New Mexico began in 1861 with the Confederate invasion and occupation of the Mesilla Valley. At the same time, small villages and towns in New Mexico Territory faced raids from Navajos and Apaches. In response the commander of the Department of New Mexico Colonel Edward Canby and Governor Henry Connelly recruited what became the First and Second New Mexico Volunteer Infantry. In this book leading Civil War historian Jerry Thompson tells their story for the first time, along with...

Twenty-five years before the Manhattan Project created the town of Los Alamos, the Pajarito Plateau was home to an elite prep school for boys, ages twelve to eighteen. The Los Alamos Ranch School combined a robust outdoor life and a carefully cultivated wilderness experience with a rigorous academic program and the structured discipline of a Boy Scout troop, perfectly mirroring the Progressive Era's quest for perfection.;John Wirth's father, Cecil, taught at the school and directed its summer ca...

In the powerful and haunting lands of the Southwest, rainbows grow unexpectedly from the sky, mountain lions roam the desert, and summer storms roll over the Colorado River. As a park ranger, Kristofic explores the Ganado valley, traces the paths of the Anasazi, and finds mythic experiences on sacred mountains that explain the pain and loss promised for every person who decides to love. After reconnecting with his Navajo sister and brother, Kristofic must confront his own nightmares of the Anglo...

In 1912 boxing was as popular a spectator sport in the United States as baseball, if not more so. It was also rife with corruption and surrounded by gambling, drinking, and prostitution, so much so that many cities and states passed laws to control it. But not in New Mexico. It was the perfect venue for one of the biggest, loudest, most rambunctious heavyweight championship bouts ever seen. In Crazy Fourth Toby Smith tells the story of how the African American boxer Jack Johnson-the bombastic an...

This book covers the history of Dyess Air Force Base from 1941 to the present. The reader is led from the construction and World War II training operations through the Cold War with the Soviet Union, to bomber and missile nuclear alert, and to the transition of a world-wide conventional weapons response capability with the B-1B and air mobility options provided by the C-130 Hercules transport. The book includes a photo tour of the base as well as information on topics such as: Abilene Air Force...

How many of us really know every side to Oklahoma's past and present?In this companion to his previous volume, ""An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before,"" Davis D. Joyce presents fourteen essays that interpret Oklahoma's unique populist past and address current political and social issues. Joyce invited scholars and political activists to speak their minds on subjects ranging from gender, race, and religion to popular music, the energy industry, and economics. These decidedly contrarian Sooner voi...

For more than five years award-winning photographer Geoff Winningham explored and photographed Buffalo Bayou, the Houston Ship Channel, and the landscape he found along the way. As he hiked and canoed the course of this historic stream, he found pristine stretches of the bayou still untouched by the encroaching city of Houston. He also found areas where the forces of nature and those of the growing city seemed to struggle for supremacy. He revisited sites of historic importance, such as Allen's...

America's Wild West created an untold number of notorious characters, and in southwestern Texas, John King Fisher (1855- 1884) was foremost among them. To friends and foes alike, he insisted he be called "King." He found a home in the tough sun-beaten Nueces Strip, a lawless land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. There he gathered a gang of rustlers around him at his ranch on Pendencia Creek. For a decade King and his gang raided both sides of the Rio Grande, shooting down any who opp...

Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from telegraphy to railroads. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture. One of the great subjects of...

In 2010 Arizona enacted Senate Bill 1070, the notorious “show-me-your-papers” law. At the time, it was widely portrayed as a draconian outlier; today, it is clear that events in Arizona foreshadowed the rise of Donald Trump and underscored the worldwide trend toward the securitization of migration—treating immigrants as a security threat. Offering a comprehensive account of the SB 1070 era in Arizona and its fallout, this book provides new perspective on why policy makers adopt hard-line views o...

An environmental history of the red rolling plains of Wichita Falls, Texas, detailing the region's past Progressive Era land ethics, water management, boom and bust oil towns, and natural resource allocation.

A commemorative edition celebrating Texas Tech University's 100th anniversary.