This text explores the natural history of Texas and more than 2900 springs in 183 Texas counties. It also includes an in-depth discussion of the general characteristics of springs - their physical and prehistoric settings, their historical significance, and their associated flora and fauna.

"Known as one of the most important public research institutions in the world, The University of Texas at Austin is widely celebrated for its collections of unparalleled quality, range, and distinctiveness. The Collections: The University of Texas at Austin offers the first sweeping guide to the university's vast object-based resources. It provides a brief history of each collection, a description of strengths, and highlights ways in which materials are used to further teaching and scholarship. Documenting more than eighty collections housed by some forty administrative units, this volume includes an historical introduction by Lewis Gould that traces the formation of the collections and acknowledges the patrons, university presidents, deans, faculty, scientists, librarians, and curators whose drive and vision we see manifested in these material holdings"--

In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth. Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.

Published to high praise--"groundbreaking . . . a landmark" (Poets and Writers)--this was the first anthology to celebrate the diversity of women who write.

Now known as the "Gateway to the Hill Country," this small, historic town was once just a stagecoach stop between Austin and San Antonio. Founded by three pioneer families arriving from Mississippi in early 1854, the area was originally occupied by Tonkawa Indians. Despite an increasing pace of growth, the agrarian lifestyle established by the founding families continues to be preserved by farmers and ranchers, and the town remains committed to preserving its history. A local walking tour features a variety of sites, from the namesake Indian watering hole in town to the restored Dr. Pound Pioneer Farmstead at Founder's Park. Another landmark is the world-famous Salt Lick BBQ, where hundreds of visitors gather nightly to mingle with the locals and enjoy a delicious "taste" of history. Still, the main attractions to life in Dripping Springs continue to be what drew the original founders: simple charm, a family lifestyle, and lifelong friendships--all set in the beauty of the central Texas hill country.

At the low-water bridge below Tom Miller Dam, west of downtown Austin, during the summer of his tenth or eleventh year, Ken Roberts had his first encounter with cedar choppers. On his way to the bridge for a leisurely afternoon of fishing, he suddenly found himself facing a group of boys who clearly came from a different place and culture than the middle-class, suburban community he was accustomed to. Rather, “. . . they looked hard—tanned, skinny, dirty. These were not kids you would see in Austin.” When Roberts’s fishing companion curtly refused the strangers’ offer to sell them a stringer of bluegills, the three boys went away, only to reappear moments later, one of them carrying a club. Roberts and his friend made a hasty retreat. This encounter provoked in the author the question, “Who are these people?” The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing is his thoughtful, entertaining, and informative answer. Based on oral history interviews with several generations of cedar choppers and those who knew them, this book weaves together the lively, gritty story of these largely Scots-Irish migrants with roots in Appalachia who settled on the west side of the Balcones Fault during the mid-nineteenth century, subsisting mainly on hunting, trapping, moonshining, and, by the early twentieth century, cutting, transporting, and selling cedar fence posts and charcoal. The emergence of Austin as a major metropolitan area, especially after the 1950s, soon brought the cedar choppers and their hillbilly lifestyle into direct confrontation with the gentrified urban population east of the Balcones Fault. This clash of cultures, which provided the setting for Roberts’s encounter as a young boy, propels this first book-length treatment of the cedar choppers, their clans, their culture and mores, and their longing for a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.