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Taken from the interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Arizona during the Great Depression, this regional history offers more than facts, figures, and stilted portraits of "important history." This glimpse into the lives of regional lifestyles-particularly in the relatively young state of Arizona-portrays history from the perspective of those who lived it. Gathered into chapters on outlaws and lawmen, miners and prospectors, cowboys, shepherds, and those who came to th...

Battles of the Red River War unearths a long-buried record of the collision of two cultures.In 1874, U.S. forces led by Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie carried out a surprise attack on several Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa bands that had taken refuge in the Palo Duro Canyon of the Texas panhandle and destroyed their winter stores and horses. After this devastating loss, many of these Indians returned to their reservations and effectively brought to a close what has come to be known as the Red River War...

Touted in his time as one of the "great men of the West," Stephen Wallace Dorsey was a Reconstruction carpetbagger who went to Arkansas and finagled and bribed his way into getting elected to the US Senate after living only two years in the state before heading West to seek his fortune. From a fraudulent New Mexico land claim to taking up mining claims and real estate in Southern California, he used sheer cunning and guile to manipulate the system of the Gilded Age to his own ends. Dorsey was a...

A look at how the buildings, streets, and institutions that comprise Houston's cityscape have changed dramatically over the years, and the many that were lost along the waySince its founding in 1836, Houston has become America's fourth largest city. It was a hardscrabble life for the early settlers, but first King Cotton brought wealth to the local economy and then the Lucas Gusher at the Spindletop oilfield made Houston the capital of the American oil and gas business. The old Texas State Capit...

Winner, Annual Book Prize, Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast at Lamar University, 2018 This family history tells the story of three generations of illustrious Texans whose progenitor, a Pennsylvania butcher-turned-lumberman named Henry Jacob Lutcher, came to East Texas in 1877 in search of new timber sources. In Orange, Texas, he established the Lutcher Moore Lumber Company, at one time the largest lumber company in the nation, and made a substantial for...

The traditional story of the Texas Revolution remembers the Alamo and Goliad but has forgotten Matamoros, the strategic Mexican port city on the turbulent lower Rio Grande. In this provocative book, Craig Roell restores the centrality of Matamoros by showing the genuine economic, geographic, social, and military value of the city to Mexican and Texas history. Given that Matamoros served the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila and Texas, Nuevo Leon, San Louis Potosi, Zacatecas, Chihuahua, and...

With Washington on the Brazos: Cradle of the Texas Republic, noted historian Richard B. McCaslin recovers the history of an iconicTexas town. The story of the Texas Republic begins and ends at Washington,but the town's history extends much further. Texas leadersgathered in the new town on the west bank of the Brazos in March1836 to establish a new republic. After approving a declaration ofindependence and constitution, they fled as Santa Anna's armyapproached. The government of the Republic of...

Look down as you buzz across America, and Oklahoma looks like another “flyover state.” A closer inspection, however, reveals one of the most tragic, fascinating, and unpredictable places in the United States. Over the span of a century, Oklahoma gave birth to movements for an African American homeland, a vibrant Socialist Party, armed rebellions of radical farmers, and an insurrection by a man called Crazy Snake. In the same era, the state saw numerous oil booms, one of which transformed the sma...

Paul Carlson engagingly chronicles the developmentof the range sheep and goat industry from Spanishtimes to about 1930, when widespread use ofmesh-wire fences brought an end to the open-rangemanagement of sheep and goat ranches in Texas.