Lucy Pier Stevens, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Ohio, began a visit to her aunt’s family near Bellville, Texas, on Christmas Day, 1859. Little did she know how drastically her life would change ...on April 4, 1861, when the outbreak of the Civil War made returning home impossible. Stranded in enemy territory for the duration of the war, how would she reconcile her Northern upbringing with the Southern sentiments surrounding her? Lucy Stevens’s diary—one of few women’s diaries from Civil War–era Texas and the only one written by a Northerner—offers a unique perspective on daily life at the fringes of America’s bloodiest conflict. An articulate, educated, and keen observer, Stevens took note seemingly of everything—the weather, illnesses, food shortages, parties, church attendance, chores, schools, childbirth, death, the family’s slaves, and political and military news. As she confided her private thoughts to her journal, she unwittingly revealed how her love for her Texas family and the Confederate soldier boys she came to care for blurred her loyalties, even as she continued to long for her home in Ohio. Showing how the ties of heritage, kinship, friendship, and community transcended the sharpest division in US history, this rare diary and Vicki Adams Tongate’s insightful historical commentary on it provide a trove of information on women’s history, Texas history, and Civil War history.
Charlie Siringo (1855–1928) lived the quintessential life of adventure on the American frontier as a cowboy, Pinkerton detective, writer, and later as a consultant for early western films. Siringo ...was one of the most attractive, bold, and original characters to live and flourish in the final decades of the Wild West. His love of the cattle business and of cowboy life was so great that in 1885 he published A Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony—Taken From Real Life, which Will Rogers dubbed the "Cowboy's Bible." Howard R. Lamar's biography deftly shares Siringo's story within seventy-five pivotal years of western history. Siringo was not a mere observer but a participant in major historical events including the Coeur d'Alene mining strikes of the 1890s and Big Bill Haywood's trial in 1907. Lamar focuses on Siringo's youthful struggles to employ his abundant athleticism and ambitions and how Siringo's varied experiences helped develop the compelling national myth of the cowboy.
Over There in the Air tells the little known story of the contribution of Texas A&M University to early aviation in World War I. Over two thousand students served in the war in one capacity or ...another, and of those about 250 were involved in the newest martial development—military aviation. The Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, as it was then known, was regarded as one of the top leading academic institutions in the country for contributions to the nation’s effort in the Great War. Through painstaking research—using unit records, after-action reviews, alumni newsletters, and countless other university documents—John A. Adams Jr. paints a portrait of the Aggie aviator in the Great War. Texas A&M aviators flew in European air forces, hunted German U-boats, went on scouting missions, and served as attack pilots. Adams has identified, often for the first time, those Aggies who served and follows them through training, life on the front, and the return home. While much of the World War I story occurred “over there,” just as much took place “over here.” Adams explores the home front as well as the battlefront, capturing campus life in the midst of mobilization, recruitment, and a devastating influenza epidemic that claimed as many as fifty campus lives. Over There in the Air is a riveting book about an important contribution of a university to the World War I effort. It is sure to catch the attention of all Aggies and those interested in aviation history.
Cowboys are an American legend, but despite ubiquity in history and popular culture, misperceptions abound. Technically, a cowboy worked with cattle, as a ranch hand, while his boss, the cattleman, ...owned the ranch. Jacqueline M. Moore casts aside romantic and one-dimensional images of cowboys by analyzing the class, gender, and labor histories of ranching in Texas during the second half of the nineteenth century.As working-class men, cowboys showed their masculinity through their skills at work as well as public displays in town. But what cowboys thought was manly behavior did not always match those ideas of the business-minded cattlemen, who largely absorbed middle-class masculine ideals of restraint. Real men, by these standards, had self-mastery over their impulses and didn't fight, drink, gamble or consort with "unsavory" women. Moore explores how, in contrast to the mythic image, from the late 1870s on, as the Texas frontier became more settled and the open range disappeared, the real cowboys faced increasing demands from the people around them to rein in the very traits that Americans considered the most masculine.Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
Expansion was the fever of the early nineteenth century, and women burned with it as surely as men, although in a different way. Subscribing to the “cult of true womanhood,” which valued domesticity, ...piety, and similar “feminine” virtues, women championed expansion for the cause of civilization, even while largely avoiding the masculine world of politics.
Adrienne Caughfield mines the diaries and letters of some ninety Texas women to uncover the ideas and enthusiasms they brought to the Western frontier. Although there were a few notable exceptions, most of them drew on their domestic skills and values to establish not only “civilization,” but their own security. Caughfield sheds light on women’s activism (the flip side of domesticity), attitudes toward race and “civilization,” the tie between a vision of a unified continent and a cultivated wilderness, and republican values. She offers a new understanding of not only gender roles in the West but also the impulse for expansionism itself.
In Texas, Caughfield demonstrates, “women never stopped arriving with more fuel for the flames of expansionism as their families tried to find a place to settle down, some place with a little more room, where national destiny and personal dreams merged into a glorious whole.” In doing so, Texas women expanded not only American borders, but their own as well.
Promised land Morgenthaler, Jefferson
2009., 2009, 2009-07-13, Letnik:
19
eBook
In 1842, Sam Houston, president of the new Texas Republic, wanted four things: peace with Mexico, peace with the native population, financing from Europe, and productive settlers for his vast, new ...country. He issued colonization contracts in an effort to meet all these objectives, but only two of President Houston’s contracts actually resulted in permanent settlement.
The article describes a view on the land surveying profession in Texas with an emphasis on the boundary determination from the perspective of a Registered Professional Land Surveyor registered in ...both jurisdictions, Slovenia and Texas, who worked in landsurveying in Texas in years 2007 and 2008. The principles of the boundary determination between Slovenia and Texas differ considerably. The main difference roots in (un)involvement of the property owners in the process which brings up numerous questions, i.e. which of the systems is more effective in terms of costs, simplicity and better achievement the overall goal and the mission of the land surveying profession in the society.
