Bøger udgivet af Texas Christian University Press

Fort Appleby, Texas, 1952--the small West Texas mountain town to which the people of Houston, El Paso and San Antonio flee to escape the dreaded polio epidemic. And then polio hits Fort Appleby, a frightening four cases in a town of 800. School is closed, and the people spend their time fighting fear and attending funerals. For senior football star Kevin Adams, 1952 is the year when his life is turned upside down by the epidemic and by the uncertainties that come of being seventeen and eager for all of life, from girls to football to great literature. Kevin struggles to sort out the many relationships in his life--there's Jasper, his best buddy and the first polio victim; Rosa, the Mexican girl society forbids him to love, and her mother, Carmelita, who drives a strange bargain with Kevin; Jay Eisenbarger, the high school principal who sees in Kevin that rare pupil in whom education lights a spark; and Mary Beth Adams, his remote and distant mother. With careful attention to detail, Bryan Woolley draws you into several small worlds--that of a West Texas town, that of adolescence, and that of the pain and grief of loss. Time and Place is a sweet, sad, sometimes funny novel that deals with universal problems yet roots them deeply in West Texas, a regional novel in the best sense of the word.

The autonomous tales in this collection are linked by a set of recurring characters and the common backdrop of New Mexico and the American West.

Gideon Ledbetter, freed from slavery, finds himself with no land, no money, and no means to make a living. He is drawn into the army, which had painted a deceptively alluring picture of cavalry life. Soon, Gideon becomes locked in a battle with a Comanche warrior, and a portrait emerges of two men who are merely pawns in a tragic conflict.

Aging cowboy and bronco-buster Wes Hendricks just wants to be left alone on his poor ranch, even when town developers offer him big money to sell it. Wes's grandson reluctantly tries to convince him to give up his home, but that was before he, too, succumbs to the ranch's--and a young cowgirl's--wild beauty.

In contemporary American politics, where absurdity often overshadows reality, Worse Than You Think emerges as a refreshingly candid and witty account of what happens when ordinary individuals, fueled by a blend of idealism and frustration, leap into the political arena. This narrative dives into the real-life journey of a high school teacher, Edward "Todd" Allen, who took the bold step of running for Congress in 2018. Along for the ride was his best friend and fellow educator, Heath Hamrick, who had a simple job: make everything work out in the end. Todd and Heath embark on a quest to fix the "crazy circus" of our partisan divide, only to find themselves in a series of comical and eye-opening situations, encountering bizarre characters that could only arise deep in the heart of American politics. Worse Than You Think offers laughter, surprises, and perhaps a spark of inspiration to those contemplating their role in democracy. Whether you're seeking validation for your political cynicism, a guide on what not to do in a political campaign, or just a good laugh, this book promises to be an engaging read.

Wards of the League is a long-lost tale from pro football's buried past. Very few people even know that the 1952 Dallas Texans ever existed and played in the National Football League. Before the Dallas Cowboys became America's Team, these Texans were nobody's team. The NFL's first venture into the football-crazed hotbed known as the Lone Star State began with enthusiasm but ended in a doomed collapse before the season was even over. The Texans' rapid rise and fall are chronicled in this book for the first time. The story of the failed team in a place that now boasts of having the most valuable sports franchise in the world today is truly a tale of being in the right place but at the wrong time.

The saga of Cynthia Ann Parker is well known to historians of the Texas frontier and readers of historical fiction. Kidnapped from Parker's Fort near Mexia by raiding Comanches in 1836, she was completely assimilated into the Noconi band. She married tribal leader Peta Nocona and bore him two sons, Quanah and Pecos, and a daughter, Toh-Tsee-Ah. Late in 1860, she and toddler Topsannah (as the whites called her) were recaptured by Texas Rangers and returned to ""civilization"" and the extended Parker clan. Cynthia Ann never adapted to white culture. She was shunted from one Parker family to another, living in constant grief and doubt—about herself and her daughter and about the fate of her Comanche family still on the prairies. Convinced she was a captive of the Texans, Cynthia Ann was determined to escape to the high plains and the Comanche way. The Parkers neither cared for nor understood Cynthia Ann's obsession with returning to her homeland and her people.Charles Brashear's thoroughly researched and vividly realistic novel, Killing Cynthia Ann, tells the story as it might have happened and turns it into a compelling and unforgettable drama. "Basing his fictional speculation on a careful reading of the historical record, Brashear chronicles the heartbreaking descent into despair of a proud woman who could not forget her warrior husband and two sons. . . [The public] will appreciate this engrossing novel, which can also supply a personal perspective to supplement history texts.”--Library Journal

In the 1870s, buffalo hunters moved onto the High Plains of Texas. The Plains Indians watched hunters slaughter the animals that gave them shelter and clothing, food and weapons. The author presents both sides of a clash between cultures. With a firm grasp of Comanche life, he describes 'The People' as very human and very threatened.

As he flees to the sanctuary of Mexico, Chacho Fernandez is unaware of the fuel he has added to the already simmering racial hatreds in and around the quiet town of Domingo, Texas. Through events set in motion by a misunderstanding, Chacho becomes a folk hero to his people and a dangerous fugitive to a group of zealous lawmen.

While the Spanish are often remembered for bringing smallpox and other diseases to the New World, little attention is paid to their efforts to eradicate one of the greatest killers in human history. In the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, King Charles IV funded and dispatched a humanitarian mission aimed at inoculating all of the imperial colonies in Latin America and Asia. Known as the Balmis Expedition, it was launched in 1803 and utilized Edward Jenner's new method by which to vaccinate people against smallpox. Using a human daisy chain of two dozen orphans, Dr. Francisco Balmis was able to bring the live virus across the Atlantic Ocean and later the Pacific. Yet, despite saving hundreds of thousands of lives, the history of the expedition was largely forgotten for the next two hundred years. Many at the time resented the Scientific Absolutism that the mission represented, doing away with old methods and cures, as well as its economic implications. Finally, the onset of revolutions in the region only a few years later resulted in a rewriting of history which necessarily eliminated any positive accomplishments of the Bourbons. The Expedition became yet another victim of the Black Legend in Latin American historiography. A voyage which Jenner himself once called "an example of philanthropy so noble, so extensive," and which served as the precursor for future world efforts at disease management, became forgotten. Yet despite this, its effects on the population and on public health efforts in the region were profound. The Balmis Expedition represented a perfect confluence of the tenets of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and Absolutism, and bridged the divided between medieval and modern public health management.

In Making the Unknown Known, leading scholars throughout Texas explore the significant role women artists played in developing early Texas art from the nineteenth century through the latter part of the twentieth century. The biographies presented here allow readers to compare these women's experiences across time as they negotiated the gendered expectations about artists in society at large and the Texas art community itself. Surveying the contributions women made to the visual arts in the Lone Star state, Making the Unknown Known analyzes women's artistic work with respect to geographic and historical connections. Including surveys of the work of artists such as Louise Wüste, Emma Richardson Cherry, Eleanor Onderdonk, Grace Spaulding John, and others, it offers a groundbreaking assessment of the role women artists have played in interpreting the meaning, history, heritage, and unique character of Texas. It places women artists within the larger social and cultural contexts in which they lived. In that regard, it contains an analysis of their varied styles of art, the media they employed, and the subject matter contained in their art. It thus evaluates the contributions made by women artists to defining the nature of the wider Texas experience as an American region. Beautifully illustrated throughout with rich, full-color reproductions of the works created by the artists, this volume provides an enriched understanding of the important but underappreciated role women artists have played in the development of the fine arts in Texas. At last, the unknown story can be known.

"In 2017, the centennial of our nation's military entry into World War I provided the perfect opportunity to bring the war's historical lessons to a wider American and Texan audience. Working in tandem with national and grassroots organizations such as the United States World War One Centennial Commission and Texas World War I Centennial Commemoration Association, the Texas Historical Commission was tasked by the governor with coordinating the state's response to the centennial. This placed the agency in the unique position of being able to document fresh perspectives on the state's role in the conflict and its memorialization. In the United States, public memory of World War I remains weak, especially compared to other conflicts. A YouGov poll from 2014 revealed that while three quarters of Americans believed the history of World War I to be relevant today, only half could correctly name the year hostilities began and only a little more than a third knew when the United States entered the war. This lack of cultural memory is in stark contrast to the war's historical significance: empires fell and new nations were born, instability brought about yet another world war and ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and accelerated social reforms saw traditional conventions rejected and minority violence increase. The First World War is easily one of the most transformative and important events of world history. A Centennial Perspective on Texas in the Great War provides a record of the memorialization of World War I in Texas in 2017 as well as offering critical background on the importance of the conflict in the United States and Texas today"--

"Javier Espinoza manages a hungry young rock band without quite enough money to record their debut album. When the slog of playing their hearts out for tiny crowds in Texas border towns gets to be too much, a dangerous idea takes hold of Javier: smuggling migrants across the border for cash. He knows a thing or two about it, after all. He made his own perilous journey from a farm in Coahuila to the US at age eleven, surviving brutal coyotes and dodging authorities. So he and the band find a ramshackle tour bus and an alibi, and are soon plunged into the heart of Juâarez, where the harsh realities of human trafficking, corrupt border agents, and ruthless cartels are waiting. "Travis Burkett knows these roads, these horizons, these fencelines, and, most importantly, the pulse and grit of the border he takes us back and forth across."--Stephen Graham Jones"--

"Hank O'Sullivan, a 65-year-old widower, lives a routine life, nursing his loneliness with cocktails at his favorite local bar in Austin, Texas. A brawl lands him in jail, and he's sentenced to community service, picking up trash beside the highway. Luis Delgado lives with his single father in a small apartment. The 16-year-old troublemaker has remarkable artistic abilities, but his penchant for sneaking out and trespassing onto rooftops late at night also lands him in community service. These loners form an unlikely friendship, and when Hank tells Luis about his desire to drive to Houston to reconnect with an old flame, Luis asks to tag along. Luis's estranged mother lives in Houston, and he has been saving money for a trip, dreaming of reconnecting with her. Hank agrees, setting in motion a raucous road trip in a hot pink 1970 Plymouth Barracuda. The Codger and the Sparrow is a rambunctious story about an unusual friendship stretching across the generations"--

Hewey Calloway has a problem. In his West Texas home of 1906, the land and the way of life that he loves are changing too quickly for his taste.Hewey dreams of freedom - he wants only to be a footloose horseback cowboy, endlessly wandering the open range. But the open range of his childhood is slowly disappearing: land is being parceled out, and barbed-wire fences are springing up all over. As if that weren't enough, cars and other machines are invading Hewey's simple cowboy life, stinking up the area and threatening to replace horse travel. As Hewey struggles against the relentless stream of progress, he comes to realize that the simple life of his childhood is gone, that a man can't live a life whose time has passed, and that every choice he makes - even those that lead to happiness - requires a sacrifice.

Life is an amazing adventure. Every moment contains remarkable beauty. Yet we are often hypnotized by popular notions that everyday experience will somehow leave us unfulfilled. So we climb mountains and visit holy cities. We search for beauty and yearn for opulence, all the while overlooking the simple truth that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand." If we could just manage to get one eye open to glimpse that heaven, all the things that previously appeared unfulfilling would transform into magnificent opportunities for learning, growing and knowing new and wonderful aspects of reality that previously passed by unnoticed. This book is about opening that inner eye. It is one author's personal exercise in seeing beyond the simple forms of everyday life. It is a study of the invisible dynamics that give life meaning and make transformation possible in all situations, all activities, and all relationships.

This mingling of biography, autobiography and art history has at its centre the life and art of the painter Philip Clairmont, a tortured figure who died by his own hand in 1984. Meeting those who were close to Clairmont and observing where he lived and what he left behind, Martin Edmond makes his own journey.

In this novel, first published by Doubleday in 1985, Texas novelist Ehner Kelton returns to the Civil War period, once again examining, as he first did in Texas Rifles, the effect of the war on Texans at home. Even while the conflict raged to the east, several groups of Texan Union loyalists hid out across the state, trying to avoid the anger and violence of the confederate sympathizing home guard. Kelton bases this story on a group who lived in a then-huge thicket on the Colorado River near present day Columbus, although the characters, incidents and town of the book are of Kelton's invention. As he always says, fiction writers are liars and thieves. Owen Danforth, a wounded Confederate soldier, comes home to Texas to recover, intending to return to his regiment. His family is torn apart by the war -- two brothers dead, one uncle, a Union sympathizer, shot in the back by the home guard. His father -- also a Unionist -- hides out in the thicket with his remaining family because the home guard, led by Captain Phineas Shattuck, has sworn revenge on the Danforth clan. Torn between duty and family loyalty, Owen Danforth faces difficult decisions until a violent encounter leaves him only one choice.

From rough frontier soldier to capable politician, Alexander Oswald Brodie earned a reputation as a solid, honorable character in American history. Brodie's most noteworthy claim to fame was his service as a Rough Rider alongside future president Theodore Roosevelt, who considered Brodie a lifelong friend. He later delved into politics, governing Arizona as it transformed from a lawless peripheral territory to the forty-eighth state in the Union. The stories of Brodie's personal life, from the tragic deaths of his young wife and daughter, to the happiness he found later on, take shape to make this a biography that authentically illustrates how Brodie became the man he was. By interweaving personal history with the greater story of national heritage, biographer Charles Herner crafts a tale that is both relevant and intriguing.For any historian interested in the evolution of the American West, Brodie's story will give a personal account of some of the region's most important episodes. As a young man, Alexander Brodie spent time at various forts throughout the West, responding to the demands of each different region. He later settled in Arizona, which he adopted as his homeland. He initiated the formation of the first cavalry troop that rode with Theodore Roosevelt that became known as the Rough Riders, sparking a beneficial friendship with the future president. Later, as governor of Arizona, Brodie managed the territory's unruly political system, earning the respect of comrades and opponents.Teacher and historian Charles Herner describes the life and accomplishments of Alexander Brodie, an intriguing figure whose accomplishments merit a careful study. Herner guides his reader through this man's life, highlighting not only the most historically noteworthy events, but also those formative moments that shaped Brodie's character.