Ceil Cleveland and Larry McMurtry grew up as friends in the little Texas town of Archer City, fictionalized by McMurtry in The Last Picture Show, which later became a film by Peter Bogdanovich. Among the locals, Cleveland has long been assumed to be the principal model for the novel's iconic character, Jacy Farrow--played in the movie by Cybill ......
The task of providing military defense for the Texas Frontier was never an easy one because the territory was claimed by some of the greatest querrilla fighters of all times-the Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and Lipans. Protecting a line running from the Red River southwest to El Paso was an impossible task, but following the Mexican War the federal ......
On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas Tower and committed what was then the largest simultaneous mass murder in American history. He gunned down forty-five people inside and around the Tower before he was killed by two Austin police officers. In addition to promoting the rise of S.W.A.T. teams to respond to future ......
Focusing on a much-neglected area of film experience in America, Black Cinema Treasures furthers the preservation of America's cultural and historic heritage, especially its African-American heritage as seen through the eyes of the African-American independent filmmakers of the 1920s through the 1950s. Ossie Davis says that the collection is one ......
On June 5, 1918, the 2nd Division, made up of soldiers and marines, launched an offensive on German lines at Belleau Wood. Using sources on both sides of the Atlantic and personally interviewing many of those who fought at the wood, Asprey combines excitement with detail and accuracy in telling of this major battle of World War I. He describes the ......
In the 1860s and 1870s, luxury river boats brought U. S. Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes; financier Jay Gould; writers Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman; and actor Maurice Barrymore, the father of John, Ethel, and Lionel, to "Queen City of the Cypress"--Jefferson, Texas. Among lesser known visitors was Abe Rothschild and his ......
Many of these folk medical practices are older than scientific medicine. Some reflect a belief in magic. Seldom written down, this oral lore has been passed down from generation to generation from the time of the first settlements in this country. Some of these cures and remedies work because the items used have medicinal properties, as modern ......
In 1890, Aunt Puss Hooks, Spurger's outstanding citizen, was not known beyond the boundaries of Tyler County, Texas. She represented a way of life as it was lived in her day and a type of people who were among the unsung builders of our nation. Belonging to a generation that had its advent immediately following the Civil War, she was one of the ......