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.

An account of the discovery and excavation of the French ship La Belle, shipwrecked in 1686 in Matagorda Bay, Texas.

In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory—they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural communities, often known as "freedom colonies," African Americans created a refuge from the discrimination and violence that routinely limited the opportunities of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Freedom Colonies is the first book to tell the story of these independent African American settlements. Thad Sitton and James Conrad focus on communities in Texas, where blacks achieved a higher percentage of land ownership than in any other state of the Deep South. The authors draw on a vast reservoir of ex-slave narratives, oral histories, written memoirs, and public records to describe how the freedom colonies formed and to recreate the lifeways of African Americans who made their living by farming or in skilled trades such as milling and blacksmithing. They also uncover the forces that led to the decline of the communities from the 1930s onward, including economic hard times and the greed of whites who found legal and illegal means of taking black-owned land. And they visit some of the remaining communities to discover how their independent way of life endures into the twenty-first century.

Offers a new reading of the history of the colonization of North America and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples.

Invaluable both for reference and collection development (with a 150-page bibliography), this guide to mainly prehistoric sites, cultures, and artifacts in the United States and Canada features some 1800 signed entries by 151 expert contributors that highlight the information upon which present North American prehistory is based. A scholarly achievement. Library Journal This dictionary of more than 1800 entries represents a collaboration of 159 archaeologists, each an authority on a particular region. The result is a source of basic information on the major prehistorical cultures, archaeological sites, and types of artifacts found in North America. The sites were selected from the more than one-half million prehistoric archaeological sites recorded in North America because they are the principal ones upon which the major chronologies, classifications, and interpretations of the continent's prehistory are based. The reference has entries for most major types of artifacts and details the important cultures, including their phases and subdivisions. At the end of each entry is a list of sources which refers primarily to published works, but which also cites unpublished documents on file at universities, museums, and government agencies when these represent the only available source of information.